Still I rise

Maya Angelou, perhaps one of the most enduring figures in modern day art and civil rights wrote a beautiful piece exposing the heart of a woman perhaps aggravated by some form of injustice that violated her femininity. While the battle is not mine, yet the need to fight for others above myself compels me to continue pressing on against the odds. 

There is no doubt the plight of women and children should be on top of any agenda for if not, the future may very well be written off as a dismal one here and now. Rapists who plunder the very essence of what being a woman is, were once one mother's child. Criminals that hake people's heads off, once sucked on a thumb in the womb of some woman. The very victims who fall at their mercy, are or once were the little boy or girl of another.

Anene Booysen was a harmless young girl, yet because men who got their thinking corrupted at one point or another, she is no more. Many more men and women, stifling their cries in the dark, live with the scars of one form of injustice or another because a certain child grew up to be menace to society. While we cannot discount the fact that one can make choices regardless of upbringing and circumstances, should there not be room to at least try and ensure all children grow up in environments where their thinking is influenced for the good of society.

Those of old said, "it takes a community to raise a child" and "every child is everyone's child". While children are not raised on food alone, it takes setting examples and encouraging children to live beyond the limits and rise above circumstances. These may seem like the words of a dreamer but then again it doesn't cost much to dream but without a dream one surely has a great price to pay.

For Anene and every mother's child who's ever had to endure pain at the hands of another mother's child:

I rise when the darkness conceals my pain

At the hands of another who will nothing gain

When my inner being is overwhelmed with grief

And in the cold my all trembles like a leaf

I will rise 

I will rise when my childhood is my demise

And like an old river my womanhood  dies

When blame to me is imputed for being me

And the lie I have to live is so I can be

I will rise

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