Letters Written In Fetters - 3
My dear son,
It is morning, this is our new beginning of conversation
So we conditioned to dream
Need no more soothsayers or magicians
We like our own Daniel Must bow and beg in bleached out petitions.
Every condition generates a response
Dreams are the hopes of a wingless generation.
We gave been conditioned to fail
That a social contract may be viable to make you hero
Let me begin this day with an apology
That shall erase all phony humility
Bred out of sickness inculcated in our process
An age with so many doctors
And a doctor for everthing
Says the world is sick
And shall not die until all are dead;
(I once met a man pursuing a doctorate in spit
And cannot tell if his pursuit was swift enough
To catch his lightning in the snail years of academia)
Enough of morbidity
I am apologising for my mortality
Than you and will not have time enough
To right the wrongs of history
But we may begin with a new honesty.
For the times we were apart
After your birth was a sun opening the calyx of my heart
That I could flower into more than manhood
When you cried upon my chest, then laughed to sleep
Because my lullaby was off-key
And your squirming made me feel fragile
And we were both vulnerable of ignorance
Because tradition says it was not in our place
To recover the warm sentimentality of the race
That gave me pride each moment you rubbed your eyes awake
This was time after time when I crawled on the rug
Beside you, discovering what I did know about myself
Recovering lost memories suppressed of our ancestors past
How they had no independence in cane nor cotton
And were not permitted to be interdependent and find
In childhood space to bloom their humanity.
Copyright © David Smalling | Year Posted 2012
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