Before the sad years made homes in our bones,
And our blood turned into riots,
We hang our swelling breasts in the branches of mamma’s¹ morala tree,
And we sang old gospels to the humans sleeping thick in our ribs,
Yet to be born.
Our soles, untouched by old thorns and the fickle waves of time,
Danced and danced and danced,
To the singing owls folded in our mother’s shadows.
And our brittle skins, smooth and glistening with Vaseline,
Yearned for the taste of Lekadibeng River.
And so we jumped the hedgerow and ran across the plains,
Pass the smoking fathers and sack-weaving mothers,
All the way to the echoes of the river,
Where we dipped and swayed our good bones
Into the hymns of the water.
And here Badimo² wrote in the spaces between our blades
On things we ought to remember.
We ought to run and run from the wrath of mother,
With her thick splinter of the morala tree that burns our bums.
And the bile coming out of in her mouth.
We ought to remember we are to be like elephants,
We are to carry our lives like silk spread across a mountain.
We are meant for light lives.
Gaamangwe Joy Mogami (21st century) Botswana
Source: Kalahari Review, Dec 13, 2016
And our blood turned into riots,
We hang our swelling breasts in the branches of mamma’s¹ morala tree,
And we sang old gospels to the humans sleeping thick in our ribs,
Yet to be born.
Our soles, untouched by old thorns and the fickle waves of time,
Danced and danced and danced,
To the singing owls folded in our mother’s shadows.
And our brittle skins, smooth and glistening with Vaseline,
Yearned for the taste of Lekadibeng River.
And so we jumped the hedgerow and ran across the plains,
Pass the smoking fathers and sack-weaving mothers,
All the way to the echoes of the river,
Where we dipped and swayed our good bones
Into the hymns of the water.
And here Badimo² wrote in the spaces between our blades
On things we ought to remember.
We ought to run and run from the wrath of mother,
With her thick splinter of the morala tree that burns our bums.
And the bile coming out of in her mouth.
We ought to remember we are to be like elephants,
We are to carry our lives like silk spread across a mountain.
We are meant for light lives.
Gaamangwe Joy Mogami (21st century) Botswana
Source: Kalahari Review, Dec 13, 2016
- mammas = grandmothers
- Badimo = Ancestors
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