What Did You Expect?

What did you expect?
After a year and a half of countless amputated souls
Couldn’t trigger you to vocalize dissenting goals
After you kept murmuring, whispering, sighing
Consciously switched to channels that kept lying

What did you expect?
After a year of students pleading for support
For you to grow a conscience, to do a boycott
After every school, every clinic in Gaza was erased
Children orphaned, nurses killed, teachers decimated

What did you expect?
While hundreds of journalists were being slaughtered
Airing it Live, wearing vests with PRESS in bold letters
As you comfortably went about your everyday routines
Ignoring sobbing mothers, pregnant women in ruins

What did you expect?
While you were shopping, as the bombs were dropping
On your own holy land, Jesus birthplace was bleeding
When you believed in their lies and media fabrications
To paint innocent civilians as terrorists in your fictions

What did you expect?
While they prepared you to overlook, to normalize genocide
With your elections, your leaders, both parties complicit
When you let anticolonial folks be treated as fringe racists
Allowed anti-genocide Jews to get labeled as antisemites

What did you expect?
That you will be spared because you have renewable passports?
Refugees, immigrants, students, asylum-seekers are just bots?
That humans can be deemed aliens, you are comfortable with that?
Not actions, but their beings declared illegal; you take solace in WHAT?

What did you expect?
You can delete the first line “First they came for the Communists”?
And revise the history with acceptable phrases to feel the vibes?
Your silence will protect you? Your words of despair will give hope?
Your refusing to join protests on streets will make the hatred stop?

What did you expect…
That Woody Guthrie’s guitar was playing to the tune of fascists?
Or that Joe Hill died to grant you an excuse to silently languish?
That students are wrong and power hungry right?
That turning the other way shall weaken the might?
That silencing notifications will stop the murders?
That yoga and meditations will end the slaughters?
That inaction will shelter you and evil won’t return?
That abducting neighbors will preserve the nation?
That calling humans legal illegal is a legit notion?
That abolition of prison camps must wait its turn?
That Guantanamo is evil only under certain regime?
That one of the two parties isn’t feeding the machine?
That genocide is not bipartisan in this society?
That it’s only now we face threat to democracy?
That the dream has not been always a nightmare?
That people of color always got their fair share?
That without struggles, power concedes anything?
That without protests, you will gain everything?
That the freedom you prize will on its own boost?
That the chicken won’t come home to roost?
That the point of Malcolm X was merely moot?...

- Saswat Pattanayak

(Self-censored and Unfree, 2025)