A Letter To My Ancestors Poem by Ofentse Hajane (The Dark So'tho Seer)

A Letter To My Ancestors

Looking sharply at the setting sun.
The reddish-yellow colour brimming with diversity.
The rock I turned into my throne,
Urgently eroding away into mystery.
The rising crescent moon telling me stories,
Of how my ancestors would gaze upon it and mutter secrets of life.
The stars accompanying it sang glories to the African arrows.
The ancestors waging magnificent magic of creation.
Death was their bewildered dog.
It would hunt out and rip souls of evil from the land of the children of the ground.
My mind went back.

Down the ages when rocks were still mud.
Gods from the sky would fall upon our world.
Demanding praises,
But fierce warriors of muddy flesh grew dark wings and took out to sky,
And sought to touch the ground no more for any god,
Let alone bow to any.
They would loudly sing:
'Afo-rui-ka the beginning.
Afo-rui-ka the home of man.
Afo-rui-ka the heart of Mother Earth.
Afo-rui-ka the alternating womb.'

Unpleasant and defeated, the gods would depart with their chariot.
The mighty warriors had won.
They stood with their feet and bowed not to a god.
But how could they,
When they themselves are gods...
The years travelled.
Time shot through the sky like an arrow.
Then came man of fair skin.
He learnt the tricks and sciences of his Afo-rui-ka.
But it wasn't enough.
He wanted more.
He wanted them to pledge to a god he had never beheld himself.
By the millions they would exterminate.
By the thousands they would pledge as slaves.
And by the hundreds they would put in a prison...
A prison of mind.
One that stood two hundred years after liberation had swallowed all...

I fixed my glance upon the horizon again.
The crescent moon steadily smiling,
Shining and shimmering.
The stars dancing.
The truth is out.
It was never their fault.
After such ages that they had searched for a home,
Now they found one.
One untinted by the filth of belief.
One that pledged not to any omnipotent, destructive god.

They were back home.
Now they wanted to relinquish all the sweet smell of freedom from those who had had it,
For millions of years...
They too were in a prison they had longed to escape,
But all they managed was to defile even the very freedom they sought.
It was not by their own doing,
But by the doing of a dream they thought existed not.
They came calling it by many names.
'Utopia, '
They would query.
To us, it was known by only one name... Afo-rui-ka=0A.

'But sire, Utopia is but a myth.'
They would spit upon their kings.
But as it was foretold by those who gave birth to them,
They too will one day rediscover Utopia.
The mother of all lands,
The mother of all that is and is to come...

But I sit here today.
Wondering.
What happened to our Utopia?
Did it crumble along with those unfilthied?
Did it perish with those gunned down as game?
Or has it yet to come...?

If Utopia is no more,
Where would the other side be?

By O.M Hajane (The Dark So'tho Seer)

A Letter To My Ancestors
POET'S NOTES ABOUT THE POEM
I verily fear the future, For its undetermined events remain unknown. But one truth I can digest— The future shines no brighter than the past. For time itself does not change. — O.M. Hajane, signing out.
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