Our truth

Would that we reached our truth quickly

On commencing our journey,

When voices like fire raged firm promise

From ramparts fortified by emancipation’s cry.

Would that our truth wove this patchwork of loose seams,

And molded our collective face, a fractured sum of its beauteous parts.

This could have prevented the disease eating at our hearts,

A hail of bullets and a million wasted lives.

Whither our truth when we hide the earth’s gift of bread

From diverted gaze?

From our slum-kissed citadels, we thrust its crumbs into the outstretched hands

Of children with hollowed-out eyes.

 Truth was left at the water’s edge when we struck an unfair bargain

For inheritance and toil.

Alas a resultant sludge of our dark designs

Has decimated life, our eternal mother.

This journey to our truth is arduous in the harsh daylight

Of our indolence.

 A disheveled multitude and I gather at an assembly

To hand-wring and feign blindness.

We are the mirror image of a few of finery, cunning

And the lore of our diverse roots

Shrill prayers and discordant testimonies.

The multitude speaks its anxiety in a medley of tongues as it asks

‘Wayfarer, do you see with our eyes? Do you dream as we dream?’

I answer, ‘With mine and the eyes of a thousand of you I see naught,

As our eyes are shut. And for the past thousand nights I have dreamed naught,

But a contorted truth, the same as our journey’.