Warning To Tyrants Poem by Cheryl L. DaytecYañgot

Cut off our tongue because through it
You become deaf to the injustice
You cannot hear what is being said
How can you hear what is not?
But the language of silence is a venom
Nature abhors a vacuum
It will fill the silence with noise
That will penetrate your deafness and
consume your soul weighed down by hatred
Till it evaporates into useless ash

Ascend your ivory towers
Arms folded, stand against a milieu of grandeur
Raise the trident so stillness will reign
Watch us with hawk’s eyes
Eager to witness our fall with a move we make
But you will jump from your verandahs
When stillness will wave its hand
Metamorphose into Freedom that inflates
The sizes of small people
Whose massive force will pull you down

Push the button on the gas chamber
Let the bullets from your armaments fall
Like harsh monsoon rain
Let the grenade explode into splinters as many
as the untruths let loose by your tongue
and the wrecked aspirations of the masses
Let the mass slaughter continue
Every day is an open-game season
Extend the parameters of the mass graves
So that they can swallow more dead bodies

Heroes will fall proclaiming that Life is a wheel
on its axis; what goes up comes down,
what comes down goes up
This is not a thought
Rather, a conclusion of thought
From the matter surrounding it
The heroes’ last rational thought will be of
the air you breathe poisoned by your paranoia
It is not a curse; it is nature registering
Itself in the mind of those about to collapse

I wonder, do you know

Tyranny
ends
for
the
dead?

It will continue to haunt those who live.

(In the year 2007, the Philippines and Thailand passed their respective human security laws purportedly to stop terrorism. The moves were however widely perceived to quash political dissension.)