Slowly, from posterior to anterior,
Black thoughts crept,
knowing one miscue would skew my mind
before the moment of reflection fully manifests.
Fortuitously, it arrives amidst the shock:
economic, social and seismic shock.
And in the frenzy, it might quickly fade
but for the pictures that froze, graphically, time
and imprinted their distant misery on my mind.
I saw pain in the little faces of three unnamed girls.
Pain roasted brilliantly like fired cacao seeds,
melting dangerously into their chocolate skin,
itself contrasting the parched earth they’ve tread.
Strife rambles through life all over their land –
there, where greenery flowers and fails,
all within the grace of a week.
There, woe is irreligious. Unbound.
It doesn’t matter the time of day;
It doesn’t matter the day of the week,
so why should it matter that this is a new month –
that its African Heritage Month?
As it has throughout history,
tribulations fall all over man,
and he spreads it all over the land,
sparing neither beauty nor innocence.
Innumerable women and girls are torn,
privately and publicly.
Ripped from all felicity,
they have no safe place to sleep,
no nutritious food to eat,
not even free air to breathe;
for even air has a price;
So guardedly they whisper,
treating it gently in their nostrils,
and even more-so on their tongues.
And though I’ve heard neither anguish nor joy
(as it might slide off those foreign tongues)
those words are likely expelled at great expense,
and more frequently, mummed.
Their pain I must own like kin,
knowing well the texture of sorrow
as it’s confined behind their steely eyes;
Knowing that whatever their origin,
they deserve a chance to establish roots.
Their chance, however, is being stolen –
massacred by weapons of power,
be it bullets, rape, or machetes.
And being a minor charge,
one might dismiss the crime of theft;
It almost seems harmless.
But return innocence to those children;
Pump compassion into the hearts of men,
and unbreak that of the women.
Resilient though we are as people,
struggling along through the centuries,
what will we have to show many Februarys from now?
Generations of thieving earthlings thriving on dismay?
