📜 Introduction
In a time when the echoes of history grow perilously loud, this poem rises as a bridge between memory and warning.
Rooted in the spirit of Schiller’s call for human dignity and inspired by the solemn legacy of Weimar — so close to Buchenwald’s unspeakable sorrow — it speaks to the urgent dangers unfolding today.
As in Germany's dark years between 1926 and 1945, once again eyes close, fear divides, and a regime sows hatred against the vulnerable: Jews, queer and transgender people, migrants, Muslims, and even the judges who dare uphold the law.
History repeats not as ghost, but as living force.
This is a call to remembrance, a call to resistance — and above all, a call to stand together for kindness, freedom, dignity, and belonging.
This work is carried by the timeless longing for liberty heard in Germany’s greatest musical voice for freedom: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Ode to the Silent Thunder Cycle
Ode to the Silent Thunder
(inspired by "Ode to Joy" by Friedrich Schiller and the Symphony No.9 by Ludwig van Beethoven)
Rise, you voices, faint yet burning,
Rise against the velvet chains!
Where the silent wheels are turning,
Dreams are shattered, blood remains.
See the broken, hear the calling,
Fields once golden now grown cold—
Hands of steel and faces falling,
March the young into the old.
Joy once lit the proud and tender,
Songs of freedom, wide and strong.
Now the sirens twist and render
Truth into a funeral song.
They who whispered lies and plunder
Mask their ruin with a smile;
Fear divides and tears asunder
Neighbors’ hearts in craven guile.
Shall we stand as if unseeing?
Shall we bow to gilded lies?
No! The soul that clings to being
Blazes brighter than their skies!
Raise the wounded, shield the broken,
Name the lost who fell unseen;
Let no silent word be spoken
That betrays what might have been.
Though the tyrants raise their towers,
Though they mock the dreamer's art,
Still we bear the unseen flowers,
Still we forge the unseen heart.
Truth is not a tattered banner,
Nor is hope a dying flame—
It is hand to hand and manner,
It is living, it is name.
Brothers, sisters, all who wander,
All whose steps have lost their track—
Come, before the silence yonder
Drags the heavens into black.
Let us weave the fierce, the tender,
Let us dare to break and build,
Till the fields of shame surrender
To the gardens hope has willed.
Chorus 1
O you spirits, still undaunted,
O you hearts that will not die,
You are starlight, you are haunted—
But you are the reason why
Still a song is left to carry,
Still a banner left to fly.
Hold the line, though voices vary—
Freedom lives when we defy.
Ode to the Broken Circle
(where history breathes again)
Sing no songs of sleeping gardens,
Sing no praises of the past.
Here the wheel turns, here the hardened
Fists of hatred tighten fast.
Not in dreams, but blood and sinew,
Not in tales, but bone and stone—
The dark returns; it walks within you,
It builds its altars in your home.
They come with badges, boots, and banners,
Smiling masks and sharpened laws.
They rip the books, they raze the banners,
They cage the hearts, they twist the cause:
"Protect the good, purge out the stranger—
Save the blood, erase the name."
Neighbors watch and sense no danger—
'Til the silence screams their shame.
They come for Jews, for queers, for thinkers,
For the black and brown and brave.
They come for mothers, fathers, singers—
No trial, no mercy, no grave.
They strip the courts, they gut the teachers,
They burn the stages, blind the schools.
They name the artists "twisted preachers,"
Break the free into their tools.
You who whisper, you who tremble,
You who fear to lift your head—
Do you not recall, assemble
Memory of your unburied dead?
It was once, and now, repeating:
The siren song, the torch-lit streets.
History does no gentle greeting—
It comes armed; it comes to feast.
When they came for sick and dying,
When they came for weak and worn,
When the wounded were left crying,
When the crippled were left torn—
Did you think your seat was higher?
Did you think yourself immune?
When they set the world on fire,
All will kneel beneath the moon.
O you walls that once spoke warnings,
O you books with banned-out names,
O you statues, cracked and mourning,
O you artists, stripped of frames—
You are not alone, nor hollow.
You are rage, and breath, and vow:
Never again must we follow—
We must break the silence now.
Chorus 2
Raise no anthem for the tyrant,
Raise no cup to gilded lies.
Hold your ground though winds turn violent,
Name the truth though kingdoms die.
For in standing, fierce and burning,
We are more than what they fear:
We are history, still turning—
We are every vanished tear.
Ode to the Unbroken
(a Rallying Cry from the Old World to the New)
Hear us now, across the waters,
Hear the tremble in our song:
We are the sons and daughters
Of those who bled to right the wrong.
We have seen the dark enthroning,
We have walked through fire and flood—
Still we rise, and still, unbowing,
We bind our names in living blood.
Stand, you hands once gripped by sorrow,
Stand, you hearts once pressed to dust.
Let no stolen, bitter morrow
Strip the kindness from your trust.
Oligarchs may build their towers,
Tyrants forge their thrones of lies—
But the fields belong to flowers,
And the dream belongs to eyes.
Rise against the iron altars,
Rise against the barbed domain!
Christian kings and broken psalters
Will not cleanse their crimson stain.
Let no cross be draped in hatred,
Let no gospel feed on fear.
Truth was never born in conquest—
It was born in arms held near.
We are not the myths they've fashioned,
We are not their broken mold.
We are millions, fierce, impassioned,
We are thunder yet untold.
Not alone, but all together,
Not in silence, but in song—
Through the black and bitter weather,
We will carry each along.
O you strangers, O you siblings,
O you scattered, scarred, and marred—
Come, take up your thousand seedlings,
Come, reforge what they have scarred.
Belonging is not given, borrowed—
It is made by heart and hand.
In each voice a better sorrow,
In each touch, a freer land.
Final Cry
Stand for mercy.
Stand for wonder.
Stand for justice, brave and wide.
Let no tyrant tear asunder
What the common heart has tied.
From the old world to the waking,
From the embers to the skies—
We are many. We are making.
We are rivers. We will rise.
Choral Cry — We Are Rivers
(call and response)
Leader:
Stand for kindness!
All:
We stand for all!
Leader:
Stand for justice!
All:
We will not fall!
Leader:
Stand for mercy!
All:
We break their wall!
Leader:
Stand for wonder!
All:
We answer the call!
Leader:
No tyrant owns the beating drum,
No king commands the song to come—
All:
We are rivers, fierce and free!
We are rising, you and me!
Leader:
For every broken, stolen name,
For every torch put out in shame—
All:
We are millions, bright and wild!
We are future, we are child!
Leader:
Against the oligarch, the sword,
Against the silence, stand, O world!
All:
We are many!
We are making!
We are rivers!
We are waking!
(crescendo, full chorus)
All:
From the embers, through the skies,
We are rivers—
WE WILL RISE!
2025/04/25
Thank you for walking this path with me. From my lands in Germany to your lands in the USA. Please take care of each other. Please take care of your friends, neighbours, colleagues, of Jews and Muslims, Blacks and Brown people, of Queer and Transgender People, of People with Disabilities and Health Challenges, of those standing up for you, for all of us.
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