On making tea today
I’m making a cup of tea and people are dying. Across the world, aunties are buried under the rubble while I place a bouquet of carnations in a vase.
I’m making a cup of tea and babies have been killed. I see their pictures on my phone, which I put down when the kettle boils.
I’m making a cup of tea and what’s left of families, of a country, is living in tents. The bombs continue to fall as I put on more comfortable pants.
I sip as they arrest students and silence journalists and scream that anyone outraged at the buried aunties and dead babies must be hateful, ignorant of all the other suffering. I swallow as they use my taxes to export more bombs and agitate at peaceful gatherings and choose to tell only the stories that preserve their position. They don’t see the violence that begets violence, the irony of history repeating itself in a different costume — in more comfortable pants.
I drink tea and write letters to a representative who doesn’t represent me. I donate meager funds to feed the children in the tents, hoping the food will actually get there when they blockade the roads and ruin the flour and kill the aid workers. I pray for this from the peace of my kitchen and then bring my cup to the sink.
I wonder how I can still be so tired when I wake up each day in a safe bed, and then I make another cup of tea.
