Ghost Dance (the Penultimate Speech to the White Man)

There is no time now to stitch together the song of what is lost.

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It is true that Malcolm only became a problem when he stopped talking about "the white man" but something needs to be said. Of course, that is not to say that "the east" isn't a sham, the "mystical" east of the swamis, sufis and fakirs. You'll still take the secular and progressive Quaid over the religious and backward-looking Gandhi any day. If truth be told, though, neither matter today.

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'...The white master will not understand the ancient words...
because Columbus the free has the right to find India in any sea...
and the right to name our ghosts...
but he doesn't believe people are equal...

Take the gold of the earth and the sun, and leave the land of our names
and go back, stranger, to your kin..and look for India.

So do not bury God in books that promised you a land in our land
as you claim...

You will lack an hour of meditation in anything that might ripen in you.

[He said]: " I am the master of time, I have come to inherit your earth."

[but] Time had enough time for us to be born in her, and return from and to her.

Don't write the decrees of the new god, the iron god, upon us, and don't ask the dead for a peace treaty...
we had longevity here, before England's rifles, before French wine...
and time is a river, when we stare into the river time wells up within us...
Will you not memorize a bit of poetry to halt the slaughter?

I will not sign my name to the peace treaty between the murdered and the killer, I won't sign my name to the purchase of a single hand's breadth of thorn around the cornfields...

I wrap myself with my name
to fall into the river.
And nothing remains for us in the new time.
Here our souls glitter, star by star, in the space of song.

There are dead who sleep in rooms you will build..
there are dead who pass over bridges you will construct
there are dead who illuminate the night of butterflies, dead
who come by dawn to drink their tea with you

so leave

some vacant seats for your host..they will read you
the terms of peace..with the dead.'

Darwish.

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It is hard not to see this in the context of Palestine: I will not sign my name!

But there is something more general here, something that needs to be said (not just in reference to the destruction of the Earth...50% of wildlife destroyed over the last forty years). 

What will the historians write of all the defeats, of the nameless ones who don't make it to their books? Shikast: already we have slipped off your page, out of your memory, the last word on your lips our freedom. To imagine that here, too, were human lives, broken hearts, is not admissible in an age of minerals, and the iron cross. What music will you play for us now in your chambers if not a death march or something out of tune?