Living in a woman’s body: Mama’s War – an original poem

Mama’s Conflict

Mama’s gone viral
Mama’s display screen shuffles sooner
Than hashtags invented by Black girls
Who flip tech into tradition each day
Boardrooms and bedrooms are battlefields
What’s at the moment’s share worth for Mama
Mama’s the one worthwhile inventory
Mama’s child is 5 years previous, mining coltan in Congo
Mama’s foster youngsters’s root chakras by no means healed
Mama’s who George Floyd known as out to
When house is a harmful place
How does Mama lockdown?

They pushed Mama into authorities for the numbers
Mama’s a model ambassador with diplomatic impunity
Mama’s on the night information speaking like a person now
Mama calls it energy strikes
Mama’s warfare is the ocean
The refuse in Mama’s stomach
The cash in Mama’s mouth
The melting ice caps releasing variants
Mama’s heating up
Mama’s a pissed off hellscape
Mama’s asking what do you do when a baby star explodes?
Mama’s final born is on YouTube suckling information
To feed the household

Mama wonders why bell hooks by no means noticed 70 and the way Winnie couldn’t stay a minimum of so long as Nelson
Mama is Shailja Patel, Assata Shakur, Stella Nyanzi, and Mona Eltahawy writing on the sting of the blade
Mama performs hopscotch on nationwide borders
Mama is ungovernable terrain
Mama is loss of life’s favorite lover
Mama is Henrietta Lacks’s blood in vaccines they gained’t share
Mama’s comorbidities are 4C hair, commodified fertility, and soil so wealthy Mama can’t personal it
Mama’s working additional shifts to purchase herself again
Mama’s in her overdraft paying antiBlack tax
Mama’s speaking to the therapist in her thoughts
About Auschwitz, Amazon and Palestine
Mama’s work retains everybody alive
However they gained’t name Mama a genius
They made Mama well-known
And acted prefer it was a substitute
For being free

Atlas, what have you learnt
About carrying the world
Mama’s warfare makes
Myths out of males
Life from man’s rib
Lies from males’s pens
In order that we'd by no means gaze
Into Mama
And name her
God

Lebogang Mashile is an actor, author and poet