It must be raining in Alagoas.

I can hear the roar of water falling
Falling
As convoys of trucks, headlights gleaming
Like fireflies, slither and crawl into a night
Of vanished toucans, carrying away
Carrying away your cheaply sold
Long long hair.
 
O! These wounds they leave.
O! These scalped and mute
Gullied hilltops.
Here teeth fall out by twenty or so
And young women with lined faces
Line the slave queues for any work.
Lord, we pray for our daily bread.
Lord, we pray for our death daily.
 
They make a desolation and call
It progress.
They make a desolation and call
It development.

But what do children know of these games
That suited ghosts in barricaded glass forts play?
What do they know of cloudy statistics? Moody
Ratings? Fickle capital flows?
Here future is the next uncertain meal.
Here days hopscotch between the gaps
Of death’s teeth. Here the face of god is
Sugarcane falling from a stalled truck.
And here I am walking, with my arms
Spread wide,
Not like a prophet who promises
Salvation or heaven – there is neither,
But as a man who still suffers some,
Into the as yet undivided, as yet
unsold country of rain,
To embrace you, my raped Alagoas.

All the above photographs © Tatiana Cardeal. Please click on the link to see more haunting photographs, and read commentry by Tatiana on the making of these photographs.

Notes: Jean Paul Sartre said literature should change the world and that writing is the most serious thing in the world. However I don’t know if it can, because to change the world takes two hands, like those of Zorba’s. So here, as I struggle to climb and claw my way into one of those high glass forts, when other realities sometimes slam into my scrubbed windscreen like bats, like night critters, I scream.

Why do I scream? Is it in some kind of horror, which is in some perverse way pleasurable – as people scream here, in dark theatres while they watch movies titled ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ etc, or in one of the gladiatorial arenas during traffic stopping events called ‘Super Bowl’ or ‘Monster Truck Madness’? In relief that it is they, those others, and not me? Is it to express some useless solidarity with the hungry, huddled and suffering masses at whom Lady Liberty now, mostly, winks? Would it be better if I simply remained silent?