I will never say I hated you, though the cracks are still in my chest.
Your footsteps kept knocking at my door.
From childhood to the hood, your shadow kept following me.
The first time my name was forgotten in bloodline,
fingers were pointed at me, not just like a child,
but as a child who was windowed,
by the people who carried my surname.
The day after a tour of transformations, from kids to kings,
we were given a chance to fly, but none of us got wings,
only chairs left empty at home.
It looked like a movie, but no, he was foreshadowing.
I was nine years old, young,
trying to flow with words,
while he spoke in riddles and proverbs.
His words flew over my head like birds.
I could barely tie my shoes.
We weren’t in the village.
He knew well how to play with syllables,
and he decided to use them now.
The room fell quiet before the word arrived.
Only three syllables: When I Die.
The visitor no one wanted to welcome,
it found him early, in the group with guns at noon.
I was nine years old, young,
when the coffin gave those three syllables their meanings,
and the venomous guest had picked him up.
The big expensive hospitals failed to save his life.
While he was breathing tones,
blood dripped from his shirt: tap… tap… tap…
but death arrived fast,
like smoke from the mouth and nose of a Rasta.
My father, a pastor, lowered into six feet of earth,
while soil knocked on his coffin.
I was nine years old,
too young to tie my shoes on my own.
The widow in the middle was my mom,
tears flowing like rain down her face,
wishing to kiss the ground with her late husband.
Part of us went down with the coffin.
The jackals, the scavengers in their faces,
grabbed what they wished.
I was just nine years old, young,
when they stopped calling me by my father’s name,
I became a protector and provider of my own,
I was just nine years old.
