By The Rivers Of Babylon

Zion is no more. Our beautiful paradise is gone, forever. No more will we be in love and free, no more will we eat from the trees, no more will we sleep in the sun and work and raise our children all in one day. Now, it is dark. We will cry now, we will work or die, our children will grow up wrong. To be free will to be bad beyond all reason, to have time will be to be dead. To live as we did before will be not to live at all. We are captives here. Zion has fallen.

Zion was our Eden. We could sing our songs and eat our food in plenty. We could laugh and love and make art. Everything we did was good enough, we were good enough. But, Zion was broken on one fateful day. Our songs would be sung no more. There would be only screaming in Babylon.

We, the people, had been collecting water from the river. We carried our clay pots on our headds and laughed as the little golden fish swam. The water was clean and sweet, and we sang out in thanks. We sang every day, so happily and so often, because nothing in the world could express our happiness better than songs. We sang:

"Oh, oh Moma, laugh with me
We have fruit, it's sugar sweet
Smile at the soil rich beneath my feet
Oh, oh Moma, come and laugh with me"

The river was the place where the children played most, and I most loved to lay in the warm sun. I would watch my friends as they played games, and sometimes, we watched the clouds float by like birds upon water. Flowers grew there, and it truly was a place that only now exists in the hearts of those who remember.

Screams. Screams from the sky. Black, hot pellets fell like ashes from the fire... so hot. Yet we knew from those who had lost their own Zion... Bombs that tear the soil fell, and we all learned soon that they also tear flesh. Blood fell almost as abundantly as tears that day, and the many days afterward. We children cried like the day that we can't remember, the day that we were born, and we wished we could forget like we forget that day. But we never will. Big machines like mismatched elephants tore down the trees and the bodies of those who could not get away. They dore down the sturdy trees like they tore down those bones of our elders, which we thought were sturdy too. Many of us died. They took the ones that lived, some of our village, in to a tent.

And then, I can't remember much more; only that they wanted money. They cursed at us and called us pigs and bitches, so many things happened on that day. Then, because we had strong hearts, we had fought back. We told them that they couldn't harm us. So, they hit us each on the head with the thick ends of what they had killed many of our fathers with. And with each head that they hit, they cracked like a gourd, hollow and clean, and we each fell to the ground.

I awoke in my mother's arms with tape wrapped around my head. She didn't cry, but only stroked my back and stared. When I too looked, I saw.

I saw Babylon.

Tall, sharp fences wrapped around us from every direction, farther than I can see. The dirt beneath our feet is dry and dusty, and the trash of our captors, along with the filth of our people, litter the ground. And the people, bloodied and defeated, sat along the ground farther than my eyes could ever hope to see. So many sad, broken people, all in one big cage. My brother, who is older, came to our moma, and he asked her if this place was our old home. I couldn't see how that could be; our home had been beautiful, and our home had made me happy. This place was not Zion. Yet, maybe because of the gash on her head, Moma nodded sadly. Yet, she said to us:

"This place is not Zion, they tell us now; here is Babylon."

And then she wept. My brother took me in his arms and he carried me away, saying nothing to me, for he too was silently weeping. We came upon a river, and there we sat. It was dirty with blood and trash. It ran brown. Trash and our own filth polluted this river, yet I was so thirsty, I drank until I couldn't drink anymore. Little golden fish, much like our own, floated on the surface of the water, dead like my father and many of my friends. I realized how much this river looked like the one that made me want to sing, where the sun shone kind, and I missed my home. I knew it would never be back. So by the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down, was were wept when we remembered Zion. For the wicked carried us away, yet captivity has taken away our song; how can we sing out our songs in a strange land?