empowering women, families, and youth-at-risk through improved literacy, increased positive media, and tools for living.

By Walter William Safar

I am standing in the street of my childhood,
and the blue April sky
rises above me,
glittering like a dreamy eye.
Down here, the wind is marching
behind my dark memories,
tiredly,
but unfaltering,
like a tiller behind his plow.

Tell me, steady wind:
How shall I escape the screams of the past?
For years you’ve been pushing me to all corners of the world,
as I was your unwanted child.
You know, wind,
that with my restless spirit, I belong more to You
than to myself.
From You, I inherited the yearning
to travel the world and seek:
the Morning in a golden cradle,
the Day in an angel’s embrace,
the Night in a bloody dress,
and midnight in black,
that preys on lust
like death preys on life.

I am standing in the street of my childhood,
next to the same window
from which I used to gaze at you, wind,
during my childhood,
and dream of the day
when I would fly on Your soft, sweet back
to a better world,
far away from poverty;
the flies captured in the spider’s web,
the miserable cries of worms
eternally crawling beneath the feet of soulless masters,
far away from the grass
and the tear-swept flowers.
I am standing next to the window
in the street of my childhood,
as if standing next to a bloody cradle,
and the memories,
my ashamed children,
cry out into this April night
with their silent screams,
reaching their invisible hands
out to me.
And I,
driven by the gales,
I am rolling across the world,
like a raindrop
looking for its grave,
in the cracks of the arid crust
of the betrayed earth.