Patria

Photograph by Marie-Lan Taÿ Pamart

By Adora Svitak

The strange thing about your motherland

is that it is nothing like a mother.

What mother eats her children?

Fathers do that: Saturn in the Goya painting,

eyes half-crazed.

Here is your motherland pitting her children

against each other in street fights

doused with gasoline.

Here is your motherland putting her children

into the woods to be chased by hunters

or made food for the wolves.

Here is your motherland pissing on her children’s

limp bodies pushed into heaps

at the butt of a gun.

Be cautious of men who speak of nations as women,

and love them thusly.

As sailors of old 

put long-haired figureheads

on the prows of their ships, wooden eyes

to watch the burning.

Adora Svitak is a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer. Her stories, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in publications including Apogee Journal, 8Poems, BUST, the Huffington Post, and numerous others. Her book Speak Up! Speeches by young people to empower and inspire is forthcoming from Quarto in February 2020.