Who can I cry to in this very second that can stop this cruelty? Even if I ran back to the city to report them, they’ll be gone by the time I get back. My thought-dial has no network. Mama Earth, there are people made of devil-skins unburned by God hands. These are the people I see in our newsfeed in our government in our schools who act as our guardians—these are the people that make a noose out of bible pages, wrap it around our ears and eyes, and hang You dry. They wrap it around the night, saying, “This is the lung of Earth.” I know these men with starving throats so full of fire to evade the teeth of ethics; they’re carving hunger into the belly of our children, saying our food security is compromised, saying there is drought, yet they’re taking these children’s hunger to dress their dinner tables. They light the torch of hunger in our bellies and parade streets and slums saying, “Here is light, here is star.”
I press my fist against my mouth to stop me from screaming at the horror. Behind closed skins, and even in the sockets of eyes, they bury themselves in wombs of little children to carve their names inside them, until their bellies balloon to sky, their hearts nowhere found. Is this what happened to my sister in her experiments? I can’t watch this anymore. Sun, moon-stain your bloodied ribs. We’re a spatter of sky, there are sinless stars broken from the voice in our throats. These men, there are deserts in their heartlands. They’ve learned how to open children-thighs, their mouths are spraying evil into the crooks of their knees, breaking the language from them in villages where the tongue is tender, the brain soft.
The village, a mecca for men
who still fondle the night with their wife hung around their necks.
They make a shebeen of children’s limbs,
turning their hearts into sorghum and dust,
teeth nicking their magic from children’s milk,
children who don’t know what it means to be the hourglass of birth
as death lilts at the cages in their chests.
It snows in parts of them that didn’t know the sun.
“Child, do you understand my anger now?” the voice in the fold of the air enters my ears, quietly. I jump, turning around. There’s no one near me. No one has seen me.
Mama Earth is intimate with my thoughts: Mama Earth is that you? Has it been you all along?
“Child, do you understand my anger now?” She asks.
All along it’s been Your voice in the air, Mama Earth?
“Child, do you understand my anger now?” the air-voice repeats into my ear.
I understand Your fury, Mama Earth.
“What must I do now?” You ask. “Must I let such people live?”
Stop them, stop them, the kids—the poor kids!
“To live is evil,” Mama Earth’s air-voice says. “Do you see that now? Now tell me, what must I do?”
Stop them please.
“How must I stop them?” She asks. “Don’t you remember this? Remember we have been here before?”
There are so many memories in my head. We became man, the machine that decimated the planet, hastened its way toward its end. The phantom of our thoughts rose from our limbic systems as we slept and night’s tentacles fed into our nervous system. Anxiety and depression grew like the urban sprawl of our cities into the marrow of our bones.
“What else do you remember?” Mama Earth asks.
Our home villages were gone, replaced by cold foreign skyscrapers, its mother tongue guillotined. With toxic lungs, our thoughts carried weapons through the night, tore the trees down, sullied the waters. I remember seeing an angry moon that night, leaking death into our time-holes. Time-holes, the only thing close we had to sanity, to humanity. That night, we silenced our thought-dials, watched our time-holes glow in the dark. My sister was bone-tired. “Climate change has crept from the built environment into the marrow of my bones,” she’d whispered in that raspy voice of hers. “That’s what’s wrong with me. Climate change lives in me. The old are lucky to have died and lived in a safer Earth. This one wants to purge me—Earth doesn’t want me born.”
I remember she’d stared at her time-hole hoping for a better reincarnation, but time was a ceaseless, indifferent creature. Her time-hole sat on the mantelpiece, anachronistic, beeping at the endless updates it starved for. During the night, we listened to the hoarse grumble of taps that were thirsty for water. She checked her time-hole where every part of her life resided. There were no funds. There were no jobs. There were no opportunities, except the hole in between her thighs to hold men who didn’t want children.
“You can start afresh,” Mama Earth’s air-voice says. “But to live again you have to die. It’s the only way I can stop or save them. Tell me, how must I stop them?” Her air-voice fills me. And I know what she wants me to say. “Why do you keep choosing to relive your family’s past and trauma. Let’s stop it now. Do not be afraid, child.”
I stand on the edge of a rock, whisper to the wind, “I know what I’m going to do will be considered evil, illegal. I do not care.” Summertime languishes on winter’s skin. Sky tears are saltier than ever. Forests and grasslands are scraped back like alopecia of the land. We’re buried in this tombstone of tar; a desert gives birth to anorexic trees.
How can they not feel that? How can they not taste that? Our evilutions are running through Mother’s bloodstreams.
Sun, Earth: your truth needs pain.
I’m sick of it.
I.
Am.
Sick.
I do not care;
so Sun, hide your eye, eclipse your birth.
Tonight, the city goes.
Sea-rise will be our baptism, brushing Her breath of our toxin.
That’s when the fissure tore through Your layers, it’s Your anger Mama Earth, and rocks from the hill eclipsed some lives. That’s why You drowned some continents, Your bile swallowing whole civilizations. Many times this has occurred based on such morbid actions. You’re sick of it. So sick it hurts. You, Mother Earth, taste like suicide, smoke, smog.
a-sleeping-earth
I don’t know where I am currently. I am a being freed of flesh. I am sight without bone, without structure. Hope is a sun that never rises. A moon that never “woke.” All it knows is a night full of stars it pulls from people’s hearts.
There’s no existence in the constellation. There is only smoke and no God in the horizon. Look at Her, Mother Earth, Her womb protruding into a constellation of space and dark matter—we matter. The heat warms Her globe, She is lit, She is lava. Atmosphere is our gas mask, forests are an underbrush of sky, and ocean waves emulate amniotic fluid. Gravitational pulls, the labor pains. The ozone layer unfolds, the gases choke. The sky is screaming. The sun broke, and he’s bleeding past our horizon.
I am gone, I am going, but I am here too.
Everything hurts. Everything—it hurts. The Earth, She hurts—we degrade Her skin, discriminating it with war, bombs, shootings, and pollution . . . there are parts of Her body desecrated, forcing people to flee, leaving Her naked. Don’t you see? She’s human too. We live in Her—Her womb. Earth can’t commit suicide; we commit it for Her. I am gone, I am going, but I am here too. Everything hurts. Everything—it hurts. Don’t you see? But the pain. Tell me you can’t smell that? The summer sky smells smoke. I smell smoke. Her soul, a pyre for our desire, burns. The summer sky . . . my starry eyes are smoked. This is what we became; Her ozone layer is torn, the sun leaks through. She is bleeding moon. Everything hurts . . . the oceans, the ecosystem—Her heart, it beats outside Her.
Our heartbeats were cataclysmic, a big bang, giving birth to pandora-things. Every creation gives birth to chaos as well—we know this now and we will be reborn.
And that Woman, soft rivers run in her throat, volcanoes thunder in her voice
She is lady,
She is monster,
She is Sun,
Hide your eye,
Eclipse your birth,
Sea-rise will be our baptism
We will be reborn.
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Tlotlo Tsamaase Page 3