My father’s God, here we come, carrying a million crucifixes
of shame, kneeling on a dunghill needing a cure for our dead selves. We are
exiles unsure of whom we are or where we are going; and vaguely are we aware of
what we have lost, having been so long away from home. Those we left behind are
gone beyond the horizon; their children and children’s children cannot even
remember our names. Where once stood our house is now a football field and
where once we gathered and called on the ancestors is now in ruins. The fences
that once hemmed in our souls have been eaten by termites. Hardly can we now
stand on our feet to bury our dead with the weeping and dirges of our
grandmothers. Sometimes, the dead stare into our faces and wonders where the
drunken pallbearers were going. My father’s God, we have wandered away from
peace and love and lost our joys in the sand.
God of my fathers, we have come home to cleanse ourselves, to
look for where they buried our birth cords only to meet a man with a huge
testicle in our mother’s bed. Everywhere are dead goats and cattle while
vultures hover above singing halleluiahs in the hideous voice of trumpets.
Where do we go from here when the ashes in our mothers’ hearth are dead cold?
Will the fire-god in heaven rekindle a new spirit in us, or
he will lock his ears and turn his face away?