Scrubbed White Like Clothes
Scrubbed white like clothes on a river stone
I search for words to write your name
Lathered of vowels
Bleached of syntax
Sanitized by the drenching light of the sun
All I have left is a glossary of feelings
Words without legs
In the sandy dictionary where I run
How did they get that sacred thing
To live in exile from its home
What did they do to my tongue
That I cannot sing
The songs of Soweto, Namibia, Biafra
In my native note?
Look at this cloth that now I wear
Cut, spliced, shaped, stitched
To suffice my salivation on a spinning wheel
O I want my mother's tongue
Dyed in the free flow of cloth
Clothes that grow voluminous with the wind
Free to flow like a river goes
Tonal with discrete chimes
For my history's telling.
Scrubbed white like clothes
On a river stone
The sunlight sucks my brittle bones.
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