Lena Mubsutina – Loving Those Who Want Us Dead

Lena Mubsutina

Loving Those Who Want Us Dead

You say again and again to love away 
oppression and destruction, 
but love doesn’t block bullets,
return the dead,
or diminish the loss imprinted in our being.

So many testimonies and records of violence 
documenting sanctioned crimes against humanity
that we are told not to place sanctions on
because that is the only terrorism
that matters. 

Don’t ask me to become a fourth-rate token 
that proves you are a free and accepting society
once we obey your demands to scatter or die
and expunge our presence from the record.

But I won’t waste my love to blunt
weak remorse that only sometimes emerges in the aftermath,
the remorse that never becomes wisdom
when the pretext for massacre comes again.