770900
8
WITH EYES AND EARS ON THE GRIEVED LANDS OF AFRICA
Listen, Africa, our Mother, is calling…See…
When we stop wanting and start being…
We will hear her wailing cry.
Wanting negates being who we are;
being reveals purpose and whose we are.
Listen, Africa, our Mother, is calling…
to forget her is to forget the ancestors
of our ancestors; to forget our beginnings.
The Diaspora has cataract our vision,
and ear-blinded us to indigenous callings;
our minds overflow with America and her causes;
our attention focused on her and her allies.
Colonialism has gone; neo-colonialism challenged;
but we remain blind to the atrocities of post-neo-colonialism.
What was once American black-on-black crime, is now
reflected in post-neo-colonial, indigenous African genocide.
Through unstuffed holes of near-distant walls,
we hear shouts of others but are ear-blind to shouts
echoing from grieved lands of Mother Africa.
Kim Jung Wong, we are aware of; but Boko Hiram
is shadowed in ignorance. Though imperishable particles
of Mother Africa, we remain mind-blind to her cries.
To the shouts of the sex trafficking of little black girls,
womb-wrecked black mothers, and emasculated black men—
all victims of atrocities committed by their misguided own—
we remain aloof to the grieving echoes resounding
from the post-neo-colonial atrocities in the Motherland.
Remember, wanting negates being who we are;
Being reveals purpose and whose we are:
We are the living and imperishable particles
of the grieved lands of our Mother, Africa.
HOMEWORK: Why of the atrocities of Boko Hiram not mentioned
in the same breath with those of Isis?
(Not Isis, the Goddess; Isis, the organization)
As the ancestral Griots remind us: “To not know is bad;
to not wish to know …[albeit, not want to know]…is worst.”
