Purpose

I am returned to the heart of worship To the tong teared flesh and searing whip To dust like lice caking hungry lips To the greased rope that savagely she grips You go paint your abstract canvas and flee The raw flesh bleeding its emergency I cannot scorn the root where I began I cannot turn my back on the struggles of man Their gnawed lives fretting on black tea I drank bush too bitter as hell that sustained me Through the lessons of school and shallow day Where a child could drown, but mother did pray Do you know Canterbury, have you lived there Where houses huddle on the precipice of fear There I felt the razor edge of man's truth We laughed labeled with punishment as brute Fathers wrung their hands for milk when mothers' cried Because their battered breast was bleeding dry. Hide Me not from such sacred memories, from grace That kept us, we marginalized dust of the race Who boiler house, cane rows, barracks earned our place The foundations for culture's pride and waste I am returned to the meaning I worship The atom of my body split by bull-hide whip.