We Were Promised Greatness
We were promised greatness, a purpose grand;
We built our dreams, bags of cement in hand,
Of a dam standing up to nature’s torrents,
For our people’s pride and our leader’s warrants.
Through toil and sweat, we strained,
To feed that loud machine
Our bodies ached, yet we pushed on with glee
For pain is the path to modernity.
One comrade slid into the unit’s maw
His screams crushed by metallic guffaw,
Reduced to paste and shards of bone,
Our payment for an unpayable loan.
We scooped him up, a pile twitching and warm
And fed it down the chute as chloroform.
There would be trade-offs, we learned.
Our path was steep, for greatness must be earned.
As time went on, the dam grew into the valley
The shadow of progress cast over our community,
We saw a beacon to light the people’s way
To tame nature and bring a brand-new day.
But gradually, rice became sawdust
And cabbage turned to grass
There was no one to take the dead
Except the drunkenly desperate.
There were no dogs left to scavenge
the dikes flowing with skin and bones
They spoke of sacrifices to be made,
Of toil that mustn’t fade,
Seeing the duty needed to uphold,
We labored on, doing as we were told
So, with sickly arms and fatigued hearts,
We wiped our wet cheeks, never to part
The machines we operated with revolutionary glee…
One night, the heavens split
And the reservoir filled with its fury.
Our dam bent and groaned
And a crack slithered across it,
As the tides came upon us.
Freed from their entombment, bones flew to the sky
Like missiles trampling our village of molded mud.
I closed my eyes
And went adrift
With corpses, bones, and bricks.
I swam with the current
Past the valleys and rice patties and villages,
Past the pagodas and cities and schoolchildren
I pushed myself onward
To live better and free,
To live, finally, for me.