The Price of Truth
1/3
Mama calls me stupid,
She says if the degree I’m studying doesn’t teach me the value of my own life,
then I’m illiterate.
She inquires, don’t they teach you how to live long in college?
She warns, don’t throw stones with your poems,
the men in blue shoot at anything that sounds like thinking.
And I ask her,
Mama, are we really living or just surviving?
Is this what you call living, Mama?
Why are your hands a résumé of hardships you never applied for?
Why do you eat hope the way poor people chew meat, slowly, like it might walk away?
Why does your face carry a calendar older than Sudan
when you’re only forty-five?
Why is a refugee ID, the only formal identity you’ve ever had?
Mama, if freedom smells like recklessness,
then I choose freedom.
In college we don’t learn how to live long,
we learn how to live right.
And if I choose to speak out,
I do not choose to die foolish,
I refuse to live afraid.
They will come for me, Mama,
they will.
But my death will serve a purpose.
It will teach them how to live long
after killing voices like mine.
And someday,
when they ask you what your late son studied,
you will say,
“He studied truth… and he died fluent in it.”
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