Burned Food

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait

Ni le mal

Tout ça m'est bien égal

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

C'est payé, balayé, oublié

Je me fous du passé

~ Edith Piaf (Ch. Dumont, music, M. Vaucaire, lyrics)

I couldn’t get the song out of my head. So sad, so strong, so unrepentant. I wish I could say the same for myself. I, I who have nothing (like the song from 1963 but before that, too if you know Italian), nevertheless and despite all the nothing I have, ought to know how to unravel the air around me. I know what one accomplishes imploring, lashing, shredding thinking. Thinking: there’s the rub. Thoughts are a curse; black memory never fails me as it should. And so:

I remember that day. I remembered it before it came and feared its darkness. Carbon grip on things that could have been green blades spinning in a warmed breeze. It was, yes, a day to remember, to fear, with all the quartz contained in a soul, if it is one’s belief.

The day was still a horizon, with hope along for alliteration. There was a whole gargantuan big stockpile of food available. It wasn’t much more than a headline. So many teeth never see food. This mammoth amount was to be a saver solver saviour of many. It was good, God said, if that is one’s belief.

Maybe it was the Wicked Witch of the West, or was it the Wizard, who sculpted a no on a screen and smashed thousands of tiny gullets with two letters. I didn’t see it until after it had happened.

Fast-fading into the future, the flames leave their black blood trail for you to follow. You who control the screen and everything else because you think king I am. You who share two letters with kiss and kill, but only deserve one of these syllables. I demand to be allowed to forget!

Yet

nothing. Silent, anonymous, even near-sighted, I still remember that day, the one when I saw it and knew. I had to give it a name that would lash it permanently to a rock like a heart. A name that would hurt, not just you or me but the world.

The name that came out this way was not the expected one. A way that never was clarity because nothing more would come off my body, especially

My seared palate, my charred words were stripped

Of skin, theirs and mine. Dry and ashen, most and moldy. All excessive. All wrong. All I could define was

What I heard, the scent of the vile. At its

Bare minimum, it was just, merely the hatred of a quagmire for its inability to produce, its addiction to swallowing.

As I called it, by the name it knew was perfect and I despised yet remained frozen if prompted to speak, like a handmaid. A name that was right because it was exactly something

They could, wanted to, and did. They knew. They still.

It was, this time, but there are more:

The Day They Burned the Food.

I heard it like a headline and the knife jammed between my brows so much it hurt. Food for the world burned and dead. Incinerated, in ovens with no alms for the poor. Yes, of course I heard the sirens and trucks rushing to douse the flames that would take thousands to delete. I head all this, everything, and mourned the food before remembering the dead, the ones without the food.

I knew then, too, that we were doomed. It’s like staring straight into the fangs of the wolf who despises people, a wolf with a pack. A rule of the few who are so cruel they think

The world can’t see them and they think

They have the right to kill you. Or anyone, for that matter.

Or maybe they will let you starve to death yet they won’t forget to

Believe in designated charities without

Accusing you of hypocrisy. Or a word they understand.

They’re cruel because it’s not just brown people

They pretend can be disappeared with.

The wave of a hand.

Not just brown workers, tan ones, café con leche ones, chestnuts and acorns, walnuts with

Accents

These things naturally could invite discrimination.

They might even (do) deserve it. It’s hard to tell.

Some of you are thinking that, I can also tell.

If that’s the reason, cruelty through food comes from prejudice. That stone is different and I don’t like it. Anyway, we don’t need so many stones. They might need something from us.

How we communicate with stones defines us, and if we do not know the language they use, we can learn from watching and listening. Cruelty dissolves.

Now for the tons of warehoused, to-be-burned

Food, high protein biscuits

Can’t we find them a place to be

Consumed?

We’ve already asked that, yet nobodoy answers or whispers a guilty name: who… who… who ordered this? Who struck the match and why? The job.

Come on. Starving children, more than

You’ll ever manage to count

How many of those foodless little ones

Have you watched go up in flames tonight?

You know you can’t count that high, you keep getting lost in the streets full of lost dead little souls.You see heads on spikes and spits and think they all look like you.

You. Watched.

You knew, you watched.

You regret it. Hearing the flames crackle in your ears, singe the ends of your hair.

You also regret hearing a poem by Mahmoud Darwish because

His views were rocky or unclear; however, his

Poetry was as different as a crystal sliced coldly:

As you prepare your breakfast, think

Of others. He wrote that because thinking

Is unpopular or not lawful. Thinking of others is a necrotic gesture nowadays. Handmaids are the last legal people.

Everywhere. Smoke everywhere. Death on every rock.

Until. You shake your head loose from the cotton of sleep. You know what it will take to rip off the slime and scales of slither-beings that have become embedded in your skin. You will write the story of the burned food and you will make it so it will no longer be possible to just stand and watch. That is a regret nobody should have to live with - the regret of just looking, without seeing, until our eyes are burnt into the surface before us. The pain of knowing we did that, we are responsible, the best accomplices ever. Now, though, now we will stop watching the horrors and write the kind back into existence before another warehouseful of food burns again.