WORDS ON THE HORIZON

TELL HER

Hold me dearly
even when your heart is filled to the very end of the brimming zeitgeist,
with grief and hate for the skin that shows up to be savaged by millenniums.
The pickets and batons can never shield us from the rain of tear gas,
and the strain that comes with turning from brown to black to purple within mere seconds,
is a deluge that fills the heart first and then blows up our eye sockets.
As the levee breaks forth,
the pressure of identity is screened for filling up empty forms, empty shells and haunted cells.

But promises break,
a mother breaks,
losing one eye to the mob
and the other to the foreseeable spokes of this revolution.
The golden jubilee of the Alabama walk is rehearsed,
in front of her daughter
and the spirit howls and breaks into umpteenth solo dreams,
amongst the same faces she grew up with.

**

Hold her dearly, your only girl.
she has been cursed as the demon child
and demonstrated as the last in line.
Words she should never learn in class,
especially not on the streets.
Hold her close, tight as a fist in a burning hand,
just below the flags.
Look out for her distracted mind and the surly weather of protests.
Take her name as she drowns among the crowd.
Tell her, most patiently, you love her,
this is for her to see,
what she will only grow to watch from the intimacy of her skin
and the proximity with which her destiny in this country calls her,
towards rivers, swamps and bayous to wade through,
neighbourhoods to traverse and antebellum sores to check,
and the barks of her family trees now become twigs up for fire.

Hold her close,
tell her why you need to proffer this cry for justice,
march with the millions and stand up to the charged batons and wounds of race.

**

Pray silently that nobody falls,
pray intently that no spray of bullets rains down on her
and still visualize that if she trips and falls,
waylaid by the hoots and cries at the top of their lungs,
a burnt out rose atleast is readily in someone's hands,
to offer to the disappearance of her tiny landscapes and the book of psalms that dictated the way to heaven and hell.

Tell her then,
to be on her guard.
Tell her then to pray to the Lord.

Tell her,
today her life is an act of salvaging luck and teeming with seething rage and anger
and to disappear into these glorious masses,
crying FREEDOM TO TRUTH,
TRUTH TO FREEDOM.

***

NOTE : this is a poem that the writer based on the righteous urge for addressing racial injustice, especially in the wake of George Floyd's death.