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Fatherless Townships
Words: Abiyah
Music: Obafemi Kitching
Flow Tectonics Publishing (ASCAP)
there:
township music of Soweto reverberates
on roads where Biko walked
and time stood still
for little boys and girls who clung to their mothers' aprons
waiting for their fathers to arrive
after ten months a year of serving paid time in diamond mines.
anxious to the point of exhaustion,
they trek for miles on dusty paths
across sand-strewn flatlands,
their tears making mudpies
as trucks carrying their fathers arrived
at the crossroads.
they felt the vibrations of rubber to gravel in their dreams.
the going is rough
its gonna get rougher
the going is tough
its gonna get tougher
if you were in doubt
its time to get out
and stop running your mouth
here:
we wait for our fathers in malls, town squares, and bullet-riddled corners
where the smoke in the air
from SUV exhaust pipes, bonfires, and gunfire
are more easily extinguished than
the yearning
burning
in our hearts
because our fathers never come.
like Nomzamo Winnie Mandela,
for us, waiting month to month seems like years on end
crowd chants of Amandla! Awethu!
make us feel powerless instead
we must beat our chests
like djembe drums
take pride
in the strides
we have made in our
solo journeys.
how is it then,
that we are orphans
when our fathers walk on graves
where we find buried
their souls?
broken promises
cut deeper into hearts
prematurely broken by absence at birth rituals.
our fathers' double-shift jobs shifted focus
from paycheck to paycheck
lost in moats surrounding
human services
far from humane.
our fathers exist only as a number
ready for deposit
not a name
(his name, a burden we bear)
and will remember,
printing
each letter painfully
jabbing
the pen into the paper
until
WE feel
THEY feel
the curse it has given us.
father-less means mother-more
and is why we present our mothers with flowers in May and tool-belts in June.
we sit on overturned cardboard boxes that used to hold the contents of our lives,
held remains of incomplete birthday party favors
that were never beneficial to us,
his flesh
they did not touch.
the going is rough
its gonna get rougher
the going is tough
its gonna get tougher
if you were in doubt
its time to get out
and stop running your mouth
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