What would you do if they left you to die?

If you had children crying for food or water-
If you had a grandmother who needed medicine-
If you had no car to leave and no money to leave with and no place to go when you got out-

Would you sit quietly and wait, hoping against hope that someone would come?
Would you lay on your roof and die of thirst rather than break the law?
Would you tell your children to hush, someone will arrive to help, just wait, wait, baby, wait.

What would you do if they left you to die?
A city has been left to die
An irreplaceable richness of culture and life and beauty
A spirit that thought it couldn’t be drowned.
An exuberance that lit the coast with joy and love and generosity
Left to die.

The heart and soul of New Orleans sits mournful
Hoping against all truth that she will be saved.
Her beauty dampened and smeared with mud
Surrounded by her dead, holding her children close
All the while knowing she’s been left to die.

In each grieving face
In each snarl of anger
In each gunshot
In each cry of despair
In each weeping mother
In each hungry child
Lives the spirit of New Orleans
Left to die.

What would you do if they left you to die?
Would you lie down and take it?
Or would you rage, scream, curse, fight?
Would you expect anything else from this city
Alive in its ferocity
Alive in what beauty remains
as that beauty contorts in anger and lashes out at anything, everything, in grief
In sorrow
In a quest for dignity
Or something to hold on to
Or revenge
Or anything to make the next hour one they can live through.

What would you do if they left you to die?
Would you judge?
Would you act?
Would you just go on and do it and be done?