Our bodies could not stay there.
We had to leave.
Only husks of our frames remain here.
When we fled,
we ransacked our own homes to rip and run through the desert.
All our carcasses could carry was the weight of our fears.
Imagine…
the sum of all our years:
(birthdays, funerals, graduations, festivals, freedoms…)
packed and pressed and compacted into our flesh!
However, fleeting feet started sinking into the sand.
Thus, we had to discard
fragments
and fragments
and fragments
of even ourselves,
to reach an unpromised land.
When we fled;
we longed to stay;
we longed to breathe our ancestral air;
but when every inhale is soaked in your brother’s blood
-strangling your inner nostril hairs –
You either leave or die there.
My dear, here…
What are rubber bullets to a zombie?
Mere breath bouncing off skeletal skin that once sunk its teeth into metal blades.
What are protested threats to the deaf and the dead?
The anthem your grandmother once proudly sang in your kitchen;
turbulently, treacherously twisted into children’s war cries overnight;
vomited, into a whisper you tucked away at border checks!
Sweated into shames
stifled in your neck;
at every tongue-twisting torment
when they ask you:
“Where are you from? Aye, you don’t understand me?
WHERE ARE YOU ORIGINALLY FROM!?
Because you, wena, you have an accent.”
Still, you left or died there.
Because there are no longer homes there,
nor here.
Only scrap-metal mortuaries,
to hoard all our mismatched memories.
No, our bones are our only homes
And even those are burnt daily to the crisp, with no warning,
warming the hands of those who once, proudly proclaimed us their ‘African sisters’!
(We have not told them that you cannot burn a ghost.)
Our spirits cannot stay here.
We long to leave…
But, only fragments of our flesh remain there.