A PLEA

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 halleluyas 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?