Biography (Them)

When you are young your life is not about you You it owe to them for love, for sacrifice and rent Youth is the margin of our parents ever do The young know their life only by old consent My father was doctor with animals in his care The blackest and the first of them in that space My mother was the Jill of every trade, a rare Exhibit of beauty in a working class of grace He out of the dry parish, made ladder with brains And climb to wring the clouds of dreams. He Matured from church school teacher, got the reins Fathoming figures, Maroon boy in ascendancy: Policeman, black sergeant, parting the waves Clerk of the Court while colonials made war Thespian for Vere John, the black hole craves Everything it cannot be like a wounded star. He did well when the war was done though. Some Whites came back alive, and their substitute yield So they coud find their sinecure. He got a ransom From gruelling things too, a cut above the common field His lettered mind scholarship him there And this society that prevented cruelty to beast Gave that astute mind its golden stair. From slum investments father rose to feast. He loved rebellion, it was his poetry, yet not he But mother was the rebel, leaving father's house Breaking bonds with tradition and its morality To bring my sister weddingless, to choose her spouse And refuse them regardless. Family's wealth She forsook, and took the rudder of her life Compassless to sea. All winds and surge she felt Survival was the only fun in her fracture strife. It walloped her, the storm of winds and fire Three children and no way back through flames Churning like a sword, waist deep wading mire Her soul unshaken its sovereign pride proclaims My own daily lessons that core my manhood Father's love of learning, mother's pride And I drifting in that Ark since the old flood Left me in a barren place where wants divide