Seipati Misapitso Poet Free verse

THE ACCOUNTING

My hands are not an agenda item.
They are a harvest.
These scars do not parse into your clauses.
They are a grammar.

You, in your cool vault of marble and data,
you who build peace like a fragile model on a high shelf,
you speak of “bodies.”
I am a body.
I am the red soil that drinks the blood-price.
I am the market dust that cakes the bread of the forgotten.
The ceasefire you broker is a comma in a sentence of wailing.
My silence is not consent. It is a deep well, filling.

I did not come to your polished table to ask.
I came to level it.
Not with fire, but with the sheer weight of morning:
the million pots set on the flame,
the million cradles rocked on the hip,
the million ledgers balanced in the dark before dawn—
a tectonic accounting you cannot ignore.

My peace is not a document.
It is a fact.
It is the wall I will build from the stones you threw,
the garden I will plant in the crater you made.
It has the scent of pressed herbs and fresh earth.
It sounds like my child’s breath, unlabored by smoke.

Do not “grant” me my rights.
I am drafting my own.
In the ink of crushed berries, in the code of sown seed.
My sovereignty is not your concession.
It is my footprint, deep and final, in the mud of this world.
It is the tree that splits your concrete, not for rage, but for sun.

Now.
Hear the gavel of my heartbeat.
The session has begun.

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