How Can a Bird That's Born For Joy Sit In a Cage and Sing

I am the wounded, standing nude in thy midst Showing to your eyes the stripes of thy iniquities Tears dripping down my chin as drops of rain from the grey clouds My face wrinkled with the pain of the violent conflicts within this ancient house of stones My body bruised by the whipping of your politics and democracy My hearing deafened by the loud cries of innocence and justice crying for their freedom of being my soul blackened and sorrowed by our loss of sense and hope of morrow The memory of our heroes which in its remembering should teach us not and never to be inhuman again,  Is but a mere miasma to this generation of a people who are victims of the lash of tyrannism  A people whose sad silence is audible from the quiet Limpopo banks to the turbulence of the Zambezi flow From the wonderful sights of the eastern mountains to the frightening caves of the western side that harbor the spirits of our ancestors A people that woke up everyday with an unutterable question of survival, A people I stand up for now with a blasphemous finger to this council.... 'How can a bird that's born for joy sit in a cage and sing...' We shall cry!!