Family

We used to journey down the stairs To what looked like a garage Found a little crevice in the cemented ground And sowed two seeds of beans The daily shower of love And the helplessness that contorted our faces the moment its green began to yellow Triple our initial investment, it did give Mother could not have been prouder Etched into my memory Are the days of fetching water two blocks away How horribly we tied our ‘osukas’ The struggle for hydro-equilibrium And how we got home with half the amount No matter how hard we tried ...

Every fibre of her feeble being echoed songs of debilitation but she was utterly indifferent to their call. Her tired body was the least of her worries as she had just descended a flight of poorly-constructed steps and had been walking on a reddish-brown path for what seemed close to an hour. Her body was screaming “stop” but it seemed only her mind was with her on this; this in turn aggravated the deposition of lactic acid to her muscles. ...