“I wonder if you will remember me
Pass my husband’s name
Will my name echo in the ears of your children’s children?
Will vigorous tongues set your hearts alight in memory of my life?
Will I be an open book read with hunger, and not merely a name -a dusty collection amongst the library of greats?
Will you turn these pages of my soul?
Will I be as a lantern in a dark alley of uncertainty?
As you forge your way through chambers of iniquity-
Will I be close to you, held in your soot-stained hands?”
We can only now answer :
“Rest easy, rest in power Mother of Azania.
We will know you.
We will come to see the softness behind all that strength.
And strength in your soft.
Our dim eyes so familiar with seeing you only as who they tell us you were…
Will know the sunshine of your being.
For now, we settle for the lantern
A light that shines in the dark,
A light that should have been held high but shone at feet’s level …
Till then, rest mama.”
Lerato is a budding writer who is learning to find her voice. She is an aspiring polymath with further interests in auditing/accounting and modelling.