The Vanished Lineage
The Vanished Lineage
(Remembering eighteen million African enslaved by Arabs)
The sand remembers eighteen million footsteps in the heat,
Yet where are all the children of their weary, broken feet?
We trace the line to Europe, and to the Western shore,
But looking toward the desert, the descendants are no more.
A millennium of silence spans the ancient, trading hand,
From the seventh to the twentieth, across the burning land.
The trans-Saharan highway, the Nile’s deep, winding bed,
The Indian Ocean waterways that carried out the dead.
We cry aloud for justice, and the West must pay its debt,
But what of Arab brothers? Have we chosen to forget?
An empire built on raiding, on tribute and on blade,
A brilliant, cruel destruction in the shadows that they made.
The West desired the young men to till the heavy loam,
But the Eastern masters wanted the women for the home.
Three sisters for each brother, in the harems of the East,
To serve the hidden palaces where masters came to feast.
And for the captured brothers, the blade was cold and deep,
A legacy of castration that ensured they could not keep
The bloodline of their fathers, nor sow a future seed
A high and fatal torment born of ownership and greed.
They guarded rooms as eunuchs, they faded in the stone,
And so they left no children to claim what was their own.
No millions now to gather, no voices left to rise,
To ask for reparations beneath the desert skies.
Yet language holds the echo, Swahili on the coast,
A blend of mixed inheritance where sorrow is the host.
A sensitive and layered past that time cannot erase,
The missing generations of a stolen, vanished race.
The question what we seek, that lingers ist
The issue of reparation by the West and a twist
Will they return? Do they exist??
Where are they to the least, I do insist???
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