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.
Copyright © David Smalling | Year Posted 2010
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