Your Land Poem by Joseph Cimanuka

Keep and cherish your land,
You people of my land,
Lest you wake in Egypt
With burdens in your hands.

Hands to tools, not chains.

Digging, stone-lunged, unpaid;
Hauling firestones for Pharaoh's rise,
Dust-buried, spine-crumbled,
Building tombs that are not your own.

Hands to tools, not chains.

You may die beneath the desert wind,
Embalmed in mud and silence,
Sealed in a wooden sarcophagus,
Forgotten by the soil that birthed you.

Hands to tools, not chains.

While your homeland waits—
Its fields fed by roots, not Pharaoh's rot;
Its hills alive with eagles and their brood,
Its future calling your name.

Hands to tools, not chains.

Keep and cherish your land,
You people of my land,
For those who abandon their roots
May become stones in another man's monument.

Hands to tools, not chains.


Keep and cherish your land, you people of my land,
Lest you end in Egypt with burdens in your hands;
Carrying firestones to build Pharaoh's pyramids,
Only to die and be buried in the sand, embalmed in mud;
Stiff and decaying in an Egyptian sarcophagus of wood,
While your own land is led by eagles, birds, and their brood.

By Joseph Cimanuka