My head is pounding, my body stiffens as I stand in the line at the Company Office, and on the monitor see the listing of the number of girls who are missing in Jamaica. This is déjà vu, I think. This is not new just  a worldwide threat wearing a new name. We have changed the language from slavery to trafficking, but the machinery feels the same, the greedy exploitation feels the same, the taking feels the same.

I am pulled back to the end of 1979 when I moved to California to pursue graduate studies, and the children in Atlanta were disappearing. Twenty-nine of them stolen and murdered.  Gone!  Most were never found or bodies recovered. Mothers wailed  and pleaded into the night, while the city held its breath to suffocating. Everyone was riled up across the nation, and then Wayne Bertram Williams was arrested. The powers that be said the killings stopped, that it was over. But Toni Cade Bambara, the African American writer ,12-year research that resulted in her book, Those Bones Are Not My Child, 1999, and who was living in Atlanta saying no, the killings did not stop. What stopped was the pressure building in the community, the uprising that was about to demand more than a single answer for a collective wound. Something was quieted, not solved. Shift blame and attention and we go on, pretend there was justice, but knew deep down it was just another cover up.

So many poems I wrote about those missing children, chapbooks and even a one act play…Where now to find those testimonies?

Now here I am 40 plus years later, standing in a line in Jamaica, looking at a screen listing children, girls—12, 13,14, 15, as young as 10—missing. Missing like it is an ordinary word, like it is a misplacement, like they will turn up behind someone’s yard, or down a lane. Missing as if they are not being taken, as if they are not being moved through channels we refuse to name.

Why are we not being more mindful? Why isn’t  this being spoken about on the radio, on the television, in the spaces where we gather and listen? Do we understand the scale of what is happening, how our children are being stolen from us, not in darkness alone but in plain sight?

I hear the easy talk, the dismissal and denial : Is run dem run away.  Dem fast. Dem want big life. Dem hard ears and disobedient. The blame shifts, loudly, condemningly onto the child. Not to the home that may be fractured, away from the systems that fail, away from the networks that prey. We soften the truth so we can sleep at night.

But my heart is constricted. I am bereaved and bereft, and I cannot soften it. This keeps happening, in different forms, across time, across borders, but it is the same thing. The same greed. The same taking. The same exploitation.

I remember standing at rallies in California in 1980 and 1981, reading poems, calling for attention, for protection, for urgency. And now, here again, I am asking: what do I do? What do we do? How do we make people see what is already before us?

Wake up, Jamaica. Wake up, Haiti. Wake up, Trinidad. Wake up, America. Wake up, Africa. Look carefully. Look honestly. Do not dismiss it as children wandering off into their own undoing.

This is real. This is systematic. And what we refuse to confront will not disappear. It will return, it will widen, and it will haunt us all.