Mustafa Santiago Ali
Dr. Mustafa Santiago Ali is the Executive Vice President of Conservation & Justice for the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), former Interim Chief of Programs at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), and Instructor at American University. He is the Founder and CEO of Revitalization Strategies. He also serves as a commissioner for The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). He is an award-winning writer and poet focused on social justice. Dr. Ali is frequently seen on television, including appearances on MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, VICE, FUSE, BET, National Geographic, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and Democracy NOW! Mustafa is also a regular guest on Roland Martin Unfiltered, Black News Channel, Tavis Smiley Show, The Dean Obeidallah Show, and many others…
Editor's Note: This poem is the 51st in our Democracy and Hope Series. This series will highlight hopeful aspects about our Democracy using various genres including poems, interviews, short stories, and articles about political events.
The dead cannot cry out for justice. Their tongues have stilled, their stories cut short by floods, by fires, by storms too furious to be natural. But we, the living, feel the weight of their silence like a second skin. It clings, heavy and damp, to those of us who walk the hardest streets, who breathe the most tainted air, whose homes crack beneath the weight of the winds, whose histories are swallowed by the rising seas.
Hurricane Helene roars through neighborhoods that are already gasping, already underwater, long before the rains come. We have known this storm, met it before in the names of Katrina, Harvey, Sandy—each one a fury that found its way into Black and Brown lives, into lower-wealth white communities, too. The storm don’t care for your race, but this country does, and it’s got a habit of building dams where we live and letting the water break over our bones.
Vulnerable, they call us. As if we are breakable by design, meant to bear the brunt of the earth’s rage, meant to bend and drown while the world watches, while the world forgets. The health of our lungs is measured in particles unseen, the cost of our survival buried in the waste of industries that leave their marks in cancer wards, in asthma attacks, in the cracked lips of children begging for clean water.
Hurricane Helene, like the storms before her, strips away the pretense that this world was built equally. It’s in the way our homes crumble, in the way our pleas go unanswered. Because when the sky falls, it always seems to fall hardest on those least able to rebuild.
But we, the living, we can cry out. We must. The dead cannot. They are buried beneath the weight of what this nation has refused to see. But we—still breathing, still aching, still alive—we carry their names in our mouths, their unfinished cries in our lungs, and we shout them from rooftops that haven’t yet been washed away.
The climate crisis doesn’t just touch us; it marks us, leaves its fingerprints on our future. And if we are vulnerable, it’s not because we’re weak. It’s because this system, this country, has made us so. Has left us exposed to the elements, to the tides that rise higher each year. But in our vulnerability, there is power. A quiet, insistent strength. The kind that knows survival is more than just enduring; it’s resisting, it’s fighting back.
The dead cannot cry out for justice. So, we must. We have to stand up, battered as we are, and demand that the world sees us. Sees how the water rises, sees how the earth cracks, sees how the storm always comes first for those of us who are already hurting. If there is to be justice, we will not find it in silence. We will find it in the noise we make, in the noise we refuse to stop making.
Because the storm won’t stop coming. But neither will we.
©️MustafaSantiagoAli
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