The Cattle Know The Way Home. By Awadifo Olga Norah. Poem by Awadifo Olga Norah

The horn speaks before the morning fully rises,
before the earth opens its eyes to light.
It moves through the grass like something remembered,
like breath returning to a body that was never truly empty.

Cattle stand without hurry in the early cold,
dust resting on their backs like quiet history.
They do not ask where the path begins or ends.
They rise as if the ground itself has spoken softly to them,
and they have heard it all their lives.

Among the Dinka, cattle are not only life,
they are praise carried in flesh and horn,
they are wealth that walks and breathes and returns.
A man does not merely own his cattle,
he speaks with them as one speaks with what is sacred.
Each name given to an ox is a living memory,
each sound carrying river, rain, and ancestral breath.

The cattle songs do not rush.
They stretch across open land like evening light.
One voice calls the white ox with the turning horn,
another calls the speckled one shaped like scattered stars,
another holds the brown ox that moves like patient thunder.
Each call is not only naming,
it is remembering what the heart refuses to lose.

Across the water, the Nuer drum answers.
It does not interrupt the song.
It walks beside it like an old companion.
It moves in deep rhythm, close to the earth,
like footsteps that know where they are going
without needing to explain themselves.
In that sound, cattle exist again,
moving through memory as if nothing ever broke them apart.

The White Nile lies between,
but it does not divide what it carries.
It holds both voices as one water,
soft and continuous, without judgment.
Reeds bend as if listening to something older than speech,
and rise again as if nothing has disturbed their peace.

There was a time when young men learned anger too quickly,
when cattle became symbols inside human conflict,
when names that once meant care became distance.
Even the pasture seemed to forget its softness then,
as if the land itself had grown tired of human forgetting.

But elders remain under trees that know patience.
They do not speak loudly.
They let silence settle first,
then they speak as one places cattle back into a familiar enclosure.
They say a calf must not inherit what has not been healed,
that memory should not be passed as injury.

A Dinka mother calls her cattle at dusk,
her voice shaped by care, not command.
Each name falls gently into the air
like milk poured slowly at dawn.
The cattle turn toward her without doubt,
as if her voice is the only home they have ever known.

A Nuer herder walks behind his cattle in quiet trust,
not forcing them, not chasing them.
He follows as one follows something already true.
Hoofprints become language beneath his feet,
and the land speaks to him without words.

The cattle do not carry the weight of division.
They do not remember where boundaries were spoken.
They remember grass, water, and return.
When they move together, dust rises softly behind them,
and even the wind cannot separate one from another.

At evening they return as they always have.
No gate asks questions.
No calf is turned away.
The earth receives them without hesitation,
as if nothing has ever been broken between them.

Let no horn call people into division again.
Let no drum be forced to carry inherited anger.
Let Dinka song and Nuer rhythm meet in the same air
without fear, without distance, without weight.
Let them rest together as they once did
when the land was still learning how to hold its people gently.

The river continues without choosing sides.
It moves through both banks as one body of water.
It does not ask permission to belong to either.
It only flows, as it has always flowed.

So people must remember what cattle never forgot.
Home is not a side.
Home is return.
And what returns does not ask who was once far.