Dum spiro, spero

"Caution, doubt, walls up! Her nerves have been eaten by the wounds that keep dripping. She feels but what is it that she is really feeling? Never truly assured and yet it is what she yearns for the most. In the depths of her soul, she knows time would calm the storm; soon the dust would settle and just like before, the world will behold her face.

Until then, his words are sweet to the ear but poisonous like a cobra’s spit. He disrupts the natural rhythms: the mother forsakes her young, and the father dances to strange tunes. Like the devil, he ensnares all who hear his words; no one will escape his snares! No one can match his canniness: neither they whose veins flow with a familiar blood nor the wise men of the villages far and near. They marvel at his sweet melodies, for they are drunk with his cunning unable to see, hear or sense when the tune changes. But then, like the law of marginal returns, the more he talks, sings, and makes melody, the less drunk they become. Soon, they escape the stupor of his cunny.

But his melodies are too familiar to his beloved. For years she danced to the rhythms but not any longer, for she has learned the sounds of the drum and the nature of the drummer. She anticipates the changes: like a heartbeat rhythm, she knows that a heart beats faster when running and slower when at rest. So, she sits in wait for the melodies to change. As she sits in wait, her eyes shrivel, and wrinkle, and lose their sparkle. Her heart and head are overshadowed by deep darkness. Her mouth tastes no more. The melodies she once sang as she cooked and bathed and cared for her young all disappear like mist. She is weary and laden from the vigil, but she must stay awake in time for the melodies to change. 

Where are the men? Why are their voices not heard? Where are the men whose whistles woke her as they yoked the oxen with ploughs? The men that were men at dawn and yet still become the men she knew at noon. Where are the men of her village?

Where are the women, the of the soil? Where are the women whose allegiance is to the suffering; who spare no cost to be at the side of the weak? Where are the women of her village?"

An excerpt from… (Title Still To Be Determined)