They told us: this is yours, that is theirs,
you are this name, he is that prayer,
you face east, he west,
you say Ram, he says Rahim—
as though the heart beats in syllables.
As though blood cares for scripture.
But we remember the days
when we broke bread under the same roof,
laughed at the same bloody films,
cried the same tears when mothers fell ill.
And that—that—is brotherhood.
Not this parchment hatred
scribbled by cowards behind microphones,
safe from the smoke and shrapnel.
Let us not forget:
the insurgence burns the shop of both the butcher and the priest.
The bullet does not ask your God
before it tears through your spine.
It does not pause to check
your passport, your politics, your prayer.
We are not enemies.
We are echoes of the same ancient soil.
We have danced at each other’s weddings,
borrowed salt, stories, shirts.
We’ve shouted over the same cricket match,
shared mangoes in the same sticky summers.
Your grief is not foreign to me.
Your child’s laughter sounds like mine.
And those who dare divide us—
the suit-clad serpents, the snarling anchors,
the men who dine in comfort
while they teach us to hate over scraps—
we will look them in the eye
and say:
Bugger off.
We see through your theatre.
We are not pawns in your grim little game.
We will not bleed for your borders,
nor bury our love beneath your slogans.
Let them draw their lines in sand—
we will wash them clean with kindness.
Let them write their laws of separation—
we will scribble over them with our shared laughter.
Let them speak of ‘us’ and ‘them’—
we will answer: Brother.
Because now, the guns speak again.
Shells whistle over sleeping homes,
and the earth—a poor, tired thing—
swallows more sons she never birthed.
Nobody wins. Not really.
Not when a boy is zipped into plastic
before he ever kisses a girl,
before he learns how to drive,
before he makes his mother proud.
Not when a mother wails like an animal
outside a crumbling hospital,
screaming the name of a child
whose hand is no longer warm.
What good is your cause
if it feeds only the fire
and not the child?
They’ll say defence. They’ll say retaliation.
Words polished like boots,
marching over corpses in clean shirts.
But none of it can resurrect a father
with half a face,
or calm a widow clutching
the sweater that still smells like him.
None of it rewinds the seconds
before a boy stepped on a mine
he didn’t plant.
And who are the heroes here?
The young man conscripted
because a job was a job?
The lad with no rifle
but a brick in his hand
because it felt like something
in a world gone mad?
Meanwhile—
those who lit the fuse
sip their Scotch and tweet platitudes.
They’ll send flowers to a funeral
they funded.
They’ll say peace talks,
but only once the dust has choked enough lungs.
Only when the cameras have left.
Here’s the imbrued truth:
It doesn’t matter who fired first
when a six-year-old dies in her sleep.
No shibboleth can console
a brother washing blood from the porch.
No anthem can explain
why his sister won’t come home.
Call it border tension.
Call it politics.
Call it anything you like.
But to the dead,
it’s just silence.
So let them draw their damned lines—
we will not walk them.
We will grieve together,
stand in the rubble
with empty hands and open hearts,
remembering that before they taught us
how to hate,
we simply knew how to live.
Because in the end,
there is no flag on a coffin
that can bring back the soul inside it.
And that—
that is the greater act of defiance.
