Mpho Leteng Poet Free verse

The Group Chat at 3:00 AM

There is a specific kind of silence that happens on a phone screen
when the uncles in the village post a picture of the dried-up borehole.
They do not add caption text or dramatic emojis;
they just let the cracked mud speak for itself to the cousins in Gaborone
who are busy paying off car loans they can barely afford.

My phone vibrates against the wooden table like an unwelcome heartbeat.
An aunt text-messages a Bible verse about enduring the famine,
typing it in all caps because her eyesight is failing under the dim solar light.
Nobody replies with poetry or clever metaphors.
We just type Amen because it is the only currency we have left to share.

In the city, we pretend we have cut the umbilical cord,
moving between air-conditioned offices and scanning barcodes at the mall.
But you cannot block the dirt road from your bloodline.
A notification pops up about a contribution for a broken tractor part,
and suddenly the salary you haven't received yet belongs to Kachikau.

I remember when news used to travel by foot or on the back of a donkey,
arriving late but carrying the actual breath of the person who brought it.
Now, the emergency arrives in blue ticks and instantaneous panic,
breaking through our neat, modern routines 
to remind us that survival is still a collective hustle.

So I don't look for rhymes to soften the blow of these text messages.
I write this down exactly as the screen glows against my face in the dark.
We are a generation caught between the data bundles we buy 
and the old soil that still demands our sweat,
waiting for the typing indicator to tell us who we have to save next.

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