You’re losing your home
like the indigenous Indians
and the buffalos.
My mother and father,
native Nicaragüenses,
know what that’s like—
their land stolen,
stripped of their birth rights,
forced to abdicate their thrones.
We set out to save you.
So we stuck you
in arctic enclosures—
refrigerated zoos—
and sold tickets.
Poked and prodded
a thousand times a day
by curious eyes
that don’t see your humanity
but the flash of their cameras
on the glass,
blinding their charity.
A catch 22:
we’ve bankrupted your environment
and purchased
a small patch of land,
where real estate is bought
for a song-and-dance.
We might as well have packed your lunch
and sent your bags
to a deserted island with soft sand,
a salt bed of tropical rags,
then left you for dead.
To sleep at night
we’ve comforted ourselves
by the warm fire of conservationism.
You “rage against the machine”
and “the dying of the light”
as did the tribes we’ve relocated
and compensated
with gambling addictions
and alcoholic provisions
on holy ground
that haunt the sacred spirits
of that burial ground.
But what about my parents
who’ve nearly suffocated,
learning to breathe underwater
like the arranged marriage
of polar bears and Indians
in artificial climates—
a Truman Show
for your friends in the wild?
Sadly, no one was there
to walk you down the aisle.
The scalper has become
the scalped
and the hunter—
the hunted.
Only a tomahawk
of compassion
can break through
this frozen oppression.
