Have you heard the Atlantic cry
to the Mediterranean?
Have you heard the ancestors
weep and gnash teeth?
Years afore, in the Atlantic core
bodies passed down the Middle
Passage. The undercurrent had
cast seaweed nets on their
corpses, and mourned the loss.
Only the moss's prayers bubbled up
in deep blue spirituals,
calling Justice in the ocean
to wake and storm
and rise up
that their spirits might find refuge.
Yet the waves were deaf.
Their firm foam claws
clasped onto the deck
cutting away at both clansmen
and slavers on colonel’s fleet.
But the loss was truth
whitewashed along with
gold and negro cargo.
So much was lost that one
can never recount the countless
loss. But I am at a loss
when I see Africans cross
the Mediterranean Sea as free
-men escaping the loss of
their country, the loss that is
poverty.
Freemen, who flee, return to a slavery.
At Libya’s coast, the slaver roasts
the Negros back, the smuggler leeches
the Negros bank. They strip
them of rights and liberty, then
ship them to laryngospasm
“Italy”
to a blind sky and deaf sea
along with the Syrian
as a pill in the mouth of the horizon.
Have you heard the Atlantic cry
to the Mediterranean?
Have you heard the ancestors
weep and gnash teeth
to see their children
swallowed at sea,
begging the European
to be free?
Samuel Rubadiri 