I Should Have Followed You  

"Can I still call you Dorothea?"—even though the black and white lines in the paper reduce you to the habit you wore, arrange you into silence, a name and surname surrendered to the cloistering of lilies. Somewhere beyond this obituary, the grown children you once taught trace grief into their office desks, their minds recalling your half-remembered lessons. The others—those who once marched beside you—remember the compadre who chose devotion over struggle, who vanished into the ghost dust of old revolutionary dreams.  

Once, you were a believer who marched along Che and Fidel, a woman with a true north compass. You were never reckless, never a ghost in Havana’s dusk. You spent your nights writing, sealing letters to revolutionaries. You drank in hope like sugarcane.  

Then, the cause hardened. The slogans lost their breath. When Fidel called the people gusanos (worms) in a moment of drunkenness, you knew you must leave the revolution and Cuba behind. It was a certainty.  

You rooted yourself among the Miami exiles. We met on campus, arguing over a political opinion piece you wrote for the college newspaper. I argued that the Bay of Pigs operation was necessary. You wrote that it was a stupid exercise in democratic colonialism and was doomed to failure. And it was.  

Our love was a bickering affair. My adolescent jokes, mocking what I thought were your misplaced beliefs, chipped our foundation. I believed I was never lost. But I was orbiting a center I refused to name. After the revolution betrayed your faith, you retreated into a steady, quieter certainty—Jesus. He told you to press your palms into the smallest child’s hands. "Teach them lessons in your authentic voice," the command.  

I should have followed you. I could have stepped over the doubt that swelled between us, made a church of our mornings, sheltered in your certainty—if only you laughed more. If only I’d prayed less in jest.  

Now, my fig grows stubborn at my window, its roots strong, its love silent, and I, too, am nearing the end. I would light a candle, Dorothea—but what god still takes offerings from men like me? I will leave a hundred dollars in the box instead, fold your name into my palm, and call this devotion.

Think nothing of water which percolates,
Liquid evaporates.
Such are the forms trapped within themselves,
Meaningless rotes.

By formlessness corporeal,
But with materiality intangible.

Forlorn immolation;
Condensates re-saturate, only different.
Incongruent crystallization;
And they say there is change!

By factors invariant,
But with sums nonconstant.

A laugh is a laugh, verbalized or written -
It's still the same fundamentally.
Tears are tears, dribbled or scribbled -
It's still the same in essentiality.

By elements unproposed,
But with totalities nonexistent.

(For Amen Teklay, Kayden Moy, and every child lost too soon)


In just two months, two lives were lost,
To blades that cut through more than frost.
Amen, just fifteen, fell in March—
On Glasgow’s street beneath the arch.

No warning bell, no time to run,
His story ended, barely begun.
Three boys arrested, young as him—
Innocence drowned, futures grim.

Ten weeks on, the pain still raw,
Kayden found on Irvine’s shore.
Sixteen years, a beach, a knife—
Another boy stripped of his life.

Between these deaths, the toll runs high—
Eleven more hurt under Scotland’s sky.
Sixteen teens cuffed, charged, or tried,
While parents ask, Why has hope died?

A 13-year-old at Asda’s door,
A blade in hand, still wanting more.
Two twelve-year-olds in Lenzie fight,
Left another boy bleeding in night.

Stonehaven shook on March fifteen—
An 18-year-old stabbed on the green.
Eight days after, a child of eleven
Caught with a blade at a funfair heaven.

Kinghorn Beach—thirty in a mob,
Four boys battered, blood-soaked, robbed.
Portobello echoed with sirens' sound—
Three teens stabbed, dropped to the ground.

In Aberdeen, a girl of twelve
Cut by another—what dark spell
Turns children into sharpened rage,
And steel the ink on every page?

A seven-year-old, knife in class—
What lessons did we let him pass?
Three schools, three knives, in children’s hands—
Where did we lose the line we planned?

Two names carved into fresh-dug graves,
While headlines scroll like crashing waves.
Amen. Kayden. Just the start—
A nation tearing at its heart.

This isn’t distant, isn’t past—
These weeks have sliced through us so fast.
How many more must we allow
To fall beneath what we allow?

What justice sleeps while young blood spills?
What silence keeps us standing still?
If two months wrought this ****** toll,
We’ve lost control. We’ve lost control

How is it right
To prove thy might
By frying babies
At night

The heather burns with purple fire,
A land that dreams, a land that’s dire.
Through every glen, a cry is cast;
“We are a nation – free at last!”

No longer ruled by distant hand,
We claim our voice; we stake our stand.
From Bannockburn to present day’
The will for freedom finds its way.

The pound may shake, the oil may dry,
But still our hope will not deny.
For richer far than vaults of gold
Are rights no outsider should hold.

A parliament, yet not the crown,
Still shackled while we lift the town.
Our children ask in modern tongue:
“Why must our fate be England ‘s song”

With Europe’s hand, with island grace,
We take our place, we find our space.
A Scottish dawn, fierce, unafraid,
In truth and trust, our future’s made.