Bleed and heal

A land so fair yet her people's hearts are wroth with pain. Pain whose pangs are evident in the hunger and illness Mother Africa's children suffer daily. Ailed by violence her children cry out, yet their cries fall on deaf ears. Perhaps Mama's children speak a language undecipherable to the rest of the world. Perhaps the weary cries have become all too familiar, rendering what they resound, to be of no consequence.  A land where possibilities abide in abundance, yet her fertility is eroded by tears awash her countenance.

Africa bleeds, I bleed, does anyone hear?

A gaping wound long inflicted

Festering with a puss my all corrupts

Resistance rising mingled with blood

Tears long shed their meaning lost

Voices choked to silence by lies

The wound throbs a broken wince

Galleys abreast where hope once laid

Draining with them substance to enrich

Barrenness dousing the desire to birth

Offspring a mere figment of dreams past

Aflame with yearning yet to possess cannot

The wound throbs a feeble wince

Thrones upon rolling hills manicured

Watered by sweat from children spent

Songs of praise turned venomous slander

Thundering feet unable to dance so plunder

Melodies once known long forgotten

The wound throbs a stifled wince

Gagged by toxins through scarred veins

Looking unto scales unjustly inclined

Paying a price dear for which is owned

Hands tied by inequality dipped chords

Disinheriting and stripping rightful heirs

The wound throbs alighting defiance

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

Want to know why you are a hero? https://www.givengain.com/activist/90569/ 

Clear Vision

The wise king said, "...Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, so he may run that reads it...."
My heart has been yearning for an answer, for a sign, something to give substance to dream that seems rather flaccid under the weighty odds . As I recall the words of yet another "...no woman carries a child never to reach the season to birth..."
The dream to take part in the Unogwaja challenge at this stage seems far out of reach yet faith is the string that ties what could be with the present reality. So to write the vision down I have hastened to do, that it may be endorsed, maybe not a tablet of stone but upon a heart filled with hope. The vision is therefore clear, do whatever is humanly possible. To envision the end, I have busied myself, not that I may perchance claim honour or worse still bestow it upon myself but that I may do a service that may perchance change the life of at least one or two in Africa.