Before the sun awakens,
Before the morning begins its murmuring,
Do you hear the cry of a plow?

Have you seen those men
Condemned to carry
The breathing weight of black soil—
Those men carved by dawn itself
With its roughened fingers?

Look at them—

Year after year,
The monsoon records its fury
Upon the roofs of their huts.
At night, like thieves,
The rivers enter their homes.
The crops drift away in water.
And upon the ground,
The smell of dead minds
Lies buried in silence.

Yet still,
Morning finds them again—
Those whom no history
Has wished to remember.
No anthem rises for them.
Yet from the harvest
Fattened by their lives,
The lights of cities continue to bloom.

To whom shall they speak
Of their hunger?
To the soil of the fields?
To the water in the furrows?
Or perhaps
To the sky itself,
Which has no answer left to speak?

For their questions,
Only a silence remains—
Older than the tongue of the nation.

Life
Is an ancient debt to them—
And the field, a stage.