By Fr. Sean Farell

 Sean Farell is a Columban lay missionary in Mindanao where he tries to help the ‘lumads’ in their struggles for a little land to live on recently the ‘lumads’ have been forced to go on o hunger strike to get their land returned to them. This poem has been born out of their tears. Here is an extract:

Many different faces
March a single beat
Footsteps fall together
In mid-day summer’s heat.

Hands hold high banners,
Splashed worlds of red,
“You will not rape this land, 
which we have gently fed.”

You cannot hear its message,
Your ears so stuffed with greed,
You stable in the dark,
For the wretched gold you need.

How can you own the sun,
Or possess a gentle breeze?
How can you buy the earth
When it’s been here for all time?
Your life but a second 
To its eternal rhyme.

How can you take rock
And rape from stone its heart,
When that which you destroy 
Is of what you are a part?

This earth on which you stand,
so scared to its core,
from this we take our life,
From each and every pore?

You cannot see the truth
That’s shattered in your pit;
Earth can’t belong to us,
For we belong to it.