Day 981

for the murdered fishers

They cast their nets
into the sea, as they’d done
from generation to generation;
and the sea yielded
to them its treasure.
They were people of the sea,
the beaches, the small boats
mostly they’d built themselves.
They needed food, and food
was abundant there: unlike
the markets, where
there was little, and no
variety, and where
things were expensive
beyond their means. They
cast their nets
into the sea, into their fate,
into chance, despite
being forbidden, despite
the oppressor’s vicious eye.
Now the quiet
of their afternoon, their
hand-carved wooden boats
rocking gently
over the murmuring waves —
one fisher singing or calling out
from moment to moment
to another —
has been destroyed.
Now the boats drift, shattered.
Now the sea
that had been their livelihood
is streaked with their blood.