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
Copyright © L'Nass Shango | Year Posted 2010
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