No More

by Ellen-Rae Cachola
circa 2004

No, no more
Please stop, end this horror
End molestation
End barbarism against my body.
I am forced to be silenced
Can’t speak of violation as you my rapist
Tear my lips with unmerciful fists
Your politics that cement my skin
So I cannot protect when you
Strike my child who speaks
Until naturally she clings to you and calls you papa.
Like a child seeking confession
She finds redemption by reading your books out loud
In a house that you rule
Force feed her with your rusting spoon
Until she sits on your lap,
Obediently she will nap,
Then you begin to finger her crack too…

Oh no, please
Leave me and my baby alone.
Let us feel at home and love this life
That has been endowed as a gift.
Since we took first breath
Grand mother universe cradled us sweetly in her arms
Wanting to teach us life without harm
Placing us to sit around the fire of the sun
Listen to her stories written on infinite pages across the sky
Day by day a new moral unfolded
And she foretold when others would be emboldened enough to defy
Her lessons
By puncturing into her heart with missiles, rockets, and bombs
Borne out of numbers of oil black bruises you place on our bodies now.

Oh let us go free and live accordingly to how we are meant:
Mother and child safe, hand in hand preserving gentle relationships
Unlike the unquenchable thrusting of your exploiting
Oil rig, drinking our life force like a vampire, parasitic. 

The only time to escape the hits and intrusion of sacred genitals
Is when you sleep,
Deeply satisfied by the release of your deformed seed
Splattered on black and blue belly.
Flesh raw and exposed
Like soil exhausted, disposed of with GMOs
We sow vegetation that does not feed
Like an aborted child with no reason to breathe.

How can I seek truth in this reality, terrifying?



Only in my child who creeps next to me
Climbing the mountains of my arms to the peaks of my shoulders
Asking for a bed time story
In my breath that refreshes her like the breeze
To hold her gently and color the dulled life with stories of long ago
Like the sunset that glows and embraces her
With purple and orange moods that warm her heart
Due to the cold cement that separates her from my touch
Only through intangible visions can she feel how much I love her
Although it seems she has been placed in such bad luck
She has been blessed to be the holder of futures

As my words linger and enter into her attentive ear…

The story I tell her is
When man, woman and child lived
They once were devoted to grow their spiritual minds
Through finding love like in the sight of wildflowers
Facing their petals toward the sun and moon.
    True belief that the celestial bodies
    Spoke of timeless messages
    That flew like invisible doves into their consciousness
    Valuable knowledge as much as infinite gold weighing as much as feathers
    Light was their hearts living in trust of their prayers
    Because fallen we were to be
As it was destiny that seeks to refine our strength.
    In our cages we were to seek freedom until death
    World wide calamities is inevitable they said
    In histories that massacred identities
    Ideologies vanished underneath seas of political tides   
Life was then defined beyond the sight of leaves and petals
But of roots and seeds
Abstract, invisible beliefs are propagated and spread
In a field as wide as the universe
Nurtured when we remember the past to create the future
So generations can break through the soil with their purpose.
To move from form to form
We break through the realm of control
And open our minds like a blossoming rose
To allow celestial bodies to feed us with messages
To become radiant like the light of the moon upon dewy skin.
   
The story I tell her brings tears in her eyes
They are faraway and glisten like stars hopeful
                        Like how she swoons to leave this world
Because the beauty she sees lies away from this plane
                        Reality is the poisonous amphetamine
                        That numbs her from the patriarch
That causes her to bleed tears in this political realm
Yet her spirit still breathes
Conceived and budding like a flower embryo
Enclosed in my womb,
Then bloomed at her birth
You were born, dear child
As springtime to the winter
You were born, dear child
The seed that remembers.

And they hold each other,
Mother and child, tight to never let go
Her feet clings close to the mountain soils
Even though his beastly roars
Echoes from the highway below
Like the bellows of her father
Penetrating her sores, infecting her might.

But inspiration she breathes when she is outside
The chants of night crickets and leaves whispering
Express the comfort of a sigh
As she listens to the solace of mother’s story telling
That nurse her spirit in this torturous plane
Threatening her with the label of insane.
But she prays with her acts of believing
The words that are absorbed up her feet and echo into her intuition:
Her body shall be left behind like
A withered flower that climbed through the cracks of cement.
But her essence will never vanish.
As the chance to expose her face to the sun
Was to put a name to the cause.
As the words to speak of forgotten stories
Are the seeds for them to never be lost.
As pain shall come to claim our bodies
Our breath would have sung the life-giving song.