African tears - Nametso Dorothy Phonchi

African tears are beautiful,
We were born crying before we knew time,
Our tears are beautiful like sun rays
like the moon and the stars,
So they fall like droplets of light
soundlessly staining our black skins with calamity,
Slowly, like rainbow sketches over the sun.

Have you ever seen a black woman cry a pool of tears to her chest?
The way her tears rub roughly across her chest,
staining remains of her untold stories on her golden face
Stories of where she has been,
Of how she has smiled, loved and slept in tears some days,
until the morning time when she creates sunshine for her daughters,
with tears still, on her hands.

African tears are beautiful,
They learnt how to drop from our fore-fathers' wrinkled eyes
during war and famine,
They learnt when to drop from saddened souls
held together by threads of black beaded necklaces made from reeds,
Just so we could pick the remaining crystals of legacy
to embrace and re-write stories from where were born.

African tears are beautiful,
We create them, we end them,
African tears are art,
Beautiful lines of tributes
to what will be, if we keep on crying beautiful tears.

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Nametso Dorothy Phonchi (Born 1990) Botswana