A Freeman’s Utopia

It’s a protest; a revolt, it’s nihilism too,
My moth­er­land has no bor­ders, no demar­ca­tion, no bound­aries,
I didn’t open my eyes to one flag,
To one chunk of land,
To one pass­port,
To a dis­tin­guished nation­al­i­ty,
I opened my eyes to this plan­et, our moth­er Earth
Its beau­ti­ful silent beach­es with the only voice of echo­ing water strik­ing the shores,
To its vast stretch­es,
Its sky-high moun­tains, with clouds loi­ter­ing in them,
To its breath-tak­ing land­scapes,
To its fields that engulfs every sin­gle ray of sun cast upon them each day,

Why am I incar­cer­at­ed in only one part of it,
I had no flags carved in my skin when I was born,
I’m vic­tim­ized by an unjust mar­gin­al­iza­tion,
My flesh has been entan­gled in barbed wires, called bor­ders, around this chunk of land I’m locked in,
And the vul­tures of prej­u­dice and dis­crim­i­na­tion are feed­ing on it,
Racist mon­sters and parochial wolves, they’re feed­ing on it,
It clung there every time I tried to escape this pen­i­ten­tiary of dis­crim­i­na­tion,
Why do you think the decayed dead bod­ies are wash­ing on shores?
They were once strug­gling to break their shack­les, and leave their cells, to fall out of the grip of dra­con­ian laws,
Why do you think we dis­cov­er dead bod­ies from ship­ping con­tain­ers?
Because they embraced that momen­tary dark­ness and suf­fo­ca­tion as their lib­er­a­tor,
Why men fall off the land­ing gears of a fly­ing plane? Because they hid them­selves there,
Hid them­selves think­ing that the plane might lib­er­ate them from their prison with­out the mon­ey those peo­ple have, who’re sit­ting in it,

Men around me are iso­lat­ed; they die in the same street where they were once born,
They’re judged; judged by the con­duct of their pre­de­ces­sors,
By the col­or of the doc­u­ment they car­ry,
When the hor­rors of death would grip me,
My soul won’t fade with a pass­port,
It will fade as a free soul,
Upon rein­car­na­tion from my grave on my Lord’s call,
I won’t rise with a visa, with a pass­port,
I’ll rise as a man,
On judg­ment day, I won’t be hold­ing a star-span­gled ban­ner or a British cross, or the Turk­ish cres­cent,
I’ll hold a mir­ror reflect­ing my own con­duct to prov­i­dence,
My life is exclu­sive; a sin­gle stop­page of my breath will bury me deep into the soil,
Soil which doesn’t dis­crim­i­nate,
It’ll be the same; Rough, dark and dimin­ish­ing,
It accepts every­one; black, white, Asian, Mus­lim, Jew,
When the soil doesn’t demand any pass­ports, O you sav­age of a man, why you do?
You have divid­ed the land, divid­ed the water, the air­space, the fly­ing zones,
The only thing you nev­er divid­ed is the sor­row of a man,
Set them free,

I live in a utopia, utopia of being free,
Free to move,
Move; From the City of Venice to the islands of Fiji,
From the Glass Beach of Cal­i­for­nia to the glow­ing caves of New Zealand,
From the Greek San­tori­ni to the Islands of Saint Lucia,
From Tus­cany to the Sahara,
From the Great Falls of Nia­gra to the Himalayas,
From the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids to the City of Mad­i­nah,
From the Ama­zon forests to the Shrines of Lahore,
I’m just a claimant of my land,
Give it back to me.
I, the lay­man, have its pos­ses­sion,
A man with no recog­ni­tion but one; the free inhab­i­tant of the moth­er earth,
It’s a freeman’s utopia,
It’s a protest, a revolt.