Rip off the string
That keeps this fragile country
In its form
55 million petals separate
Serrated blades guarding your bursting heart
At the centre
What did your father know
When he raised you like a boy?
Which part of your face’s perfection
Broke your mother and every mother
Howling behinds mouths
No one dares listen to?
The little girl who holds a stick
And beats a man’s world into submission
Is the woman who lays diamonds
On a murderous nation’s neck
And then sets it ablaze
Who does not call this justice?
The queen draped in regalia
On a subversive courtroom catwalk
Is the prisoner stripped dripping blood
Paraded before men turned into beasts
Who taught our men to hate us?
If they hate us, can we call them ours?
In the hours of loneliness where your rivers
Burst onto pillows, sleeping children and concrete floors
Did we ever stop being yours?
They lie in your name
Despise in your name
Erase
Berate
Bludgeon
Belittle
Deny in your name
In the ravenous gorge between
What is written and what is true
An incendiary wall rises in your name
Like you,
they would cast us as monsters
Steal our gems
Then discard our carcasses
In the wasteland of the scavenged
Like you,
They would immortalize us
With the mouths they use
To say they love their mothers
In a country of contradictions
Mothers leave their children
Because they love their children
Men give women their names
Women give men’s names meaning
Men carry this wealth out the door
As they are leaving
You are
Ever present and invisible
Amplified and silenced
Tortured and free
Married and abandoned
Elevated and degraded
Warrior and healer
Comrade and lover
Bleeding and beautiful
Playful and ferocious
Mary and Marys Magdalene
Oshun
Kali
Sekhmet
With life and death in the palm of your hand
You are gone
And
Everywhere.
