Its in the way they hold their voice

Mimic their body to score what’s left of our collective madness

Sit in their wounds and break bread with all that destroys them

Tiny fingers awaiting tears that drip from their drowsy chin

Just so I could possibly say, I held them together as they fall

 

The women in my family, they faith in their own prayers

Parcel and send it all to God. I have always wondered,

If they are not forgotten, if their God hasn’t disregarded them

Their tears and jubilations, their footsteps at midnight too

As they scrub their husbands’ sweat off their chest

 

My thoughts do have branches of their own

They sing through all that my eyes and ears have witnessed

They do not play hide and seek, neither do they tell on others

They bury themselves in their own coffins, so much that

It’s the first thing you see when you look at their faces

Yet, they mask it with a smile, their delicious mafé and

Help the neighbours birth their newly borns

 

These women, they handmake their own soaps

Knit their own doormats, I have often wondered

If they have not become all the things they make

To their men who empty their arrogance on them

 

How do I contain myself to not participate in the madness of others

Ask them to surrender their silences, just so I could burn them all over again

Something to sermon their fears and allow their children to not inherit them

So a new community could magic through all the wounds that still breathe

 

I think to say that its in the water they drink

In their mother’s breast milk and their father’s silences

Their oddity and insanity, the need to keep their desires at bay

While it swallows them whole, then volume up their trauma

Something their eyes don’t see, but they quiet themselves,

To honour their mother, and their marriage

 

Sacrilege they would say

To place your wound at the dinner table

Gather them and dish it all out to the streets dogs

So they could bark them out and we wouldn’t be confronted

By how they stink and how they are intended to dilute our traditions

 

Voices swallowed by the holocaust

Silences eaten by the termites and bedbugs

Children drinking from their mother’s milk

Streams with sweat sipping into cooking pots

Scoop by scoop, all that’s been discarded,

Unknowingly harvested into our mouths again

 

Its in the way they hold their voice

Mimic their body to score what’s left of our collective madness

Sit in their wounds and break bread with all that destroys them

Tiny fingers awaiting tears that drip from their drowsy chin

Just so I could possibly say, I held them together as they fall?