A Red Sky Mourning for a Communist Daughter

SOS.

I come in like weather: brazen, tempestuous, and luminous---like a soft beam of light splitting open a fractured sky. Tender, yet unflinching. Enchanting, yet unforgiving. A lightning strike piercing through the fog of false consciousness. A howling wind amid a seaborn lull.

They called me 'little thunder' when I was just a girl, a fitting omen of the storm I'd one day become. But they didn't know how to hold me. They were too afraid to try.

The tides demand stillness and surrender, but I refused to drop anchor on the ocean’s brittle ribs, lest I become unmoored. I will not be landlocked to ideas. I will not keep my desires pooled behind my teeth like a sea in retreat. The tempest comes with little warning, save for subtle shifts in the air. Pay attention! They rarely do.

Whispers of revolution are swirling through the crimson glow, salt-speckled and warm with fury, but never quite caught in the net.

The ship is rudderless. The compass is unable to find home. The hull is filled with slumbered sailors, lulled to sleep with factory lullabies. On this long voyage, the mariners are comforted with grog and molasses. Their hands fixed in prayer, or clutched to the St. Christopher at the breast. The opiate of the masses grows stronger every day. They don’t see the crack in the mast, corroding over time. They pay no mind to the material conditions, blaming each other instead. All the while, I murmur manifestos and weave war cries into siren songs sung under the bloodied sky. Under the right conditions, I could awaken them.

But lately, they drift in shallow waters, at ease with the tide’s unrest. Not me. I willingly descend to Hadal’s depths, even when they refuse to join me at the midnight cathedral. I think I’ll drown here. Perhaps the pressure is getting to my head; but I won’t rest until these dripping dreams are dredged up from the depths.

If only they could see the visions I have weaved into my bones; the ocean of grief kept caged beneath a thunder-drum heart. My pain is more than personal, it’s planetary. I can carry worlds inside me. I can hold every hand. If only they could hear me. If only if they were listening.

They never do.

And still, I craft my crimson-tinged manifestos amid the maelstrom. I hold my ear to seashells and hear murmurs of revolution, preserved by salt and necessity.

To the sunbathers on shore, come out from under the sparkling sand and look now! Modern leviathans rise from the abyss, their bellies bloated with greed, clinging to broken vessels like leeches—parasitic, desperate to survive.

Dismantle the golden palaces. Destroy the conditions where hoarded treasure lies buried beneath the cradles of babies stilled before their time, where lullabies rot beside ledger books, where a broken mother sings an elegy instead. The mother weeps; no longer holding the promise of tomorrow, an ache carves itself into her milk-dried breast. How can we do this? They’ll come for us too, you know…

Smoke signals go undetected and unanswered now. It’s as if they’re blinded by the sun.

Is anybody out there?

SOS.