My Grandma

Her teeth are no longer white and bright as in 1960s when she first fell in love with my grandfather. I blame that BB, because she always has a headache when she doesn’t take it. People from all corners of Bothaville are afraid of her. My dear black child has accused her of being a witch. Some have labelled her as a healer. But I label her as my grandma. She is my strength and also my weakness, the love of my life and the philosopher who inspires everything. She is the inspiration for all my books, she is the heart of all my poems. Without the stories she told me when I was three years old, I wouldn’t be the poet that I am today. Her way of telling the stories have given birth to my style of writing. The characters in her stories made me into the author that I am today. I had failed to thank my grandfather before he was wiped off this dry planet, to either the place of rest or given powers somehow to protect me from distractions on this earth. My grandma held my hand and dragged me to his grave, ordered me to place a stone on top of his grave and forced me to speak to him. “Speak to your grandfather, Teboho, he is listening to you,” she said. She kneeled before the grave where the person she’d loved was laid. The person she knew and spent her life with since she was seventeen. But 2009 was not kind to us as it wiped his roots out. Does it make a difference that I am named after him? Yes his name will live on, but his body has decomposed. My grandma is old, but thankfully she knows 2021. I know how her body is tired, the aches she feels at night, waking up with a headache and a heavy load on her body, As if her ninety-six years are not both blessing and curse. I know she can’t live on but her memory shall. All my poems and my books will always reflect her. I will recite poems about her, I will paint her as the hero she is. I will be her philosopher and tell her story to her grandchildren whom she kisses every night before she goes to sleep Sleep that might turn into a nightmare for both the Ntaita and Tayita families. We will weep on but her love will give us strength again.