Imagine your Ancestors, and my ancestors –

For they are one and the same –

Soft feet padding across the good earth,

Which bore life, and reclaimed it,

Whose black, loamy soils are rich with the sacred dead;

Imagine them turning their primitive faces to the sky,

Which is burning;

Imagine their fear (feel it as your own)

And think of the insurmountable drive to survive

That has led them to me, and to you;

Imagine my ancestors, and your ancestors-

For they are one and the same –

And how they would have wept,

Had only they known how,

To learn that so many of their fellows

Have gone to dust.