2013-10-11    Kevin Walters - for The Year of the Girl Child

(Comments welcome here)

The Queen of Africa

In a cold light mist on a sand sea

Ten thousand souls waiting to be consoled

This story must be told

The Queen of Africa and she is ten years old

In cough, splutter, sigh and cry

Ten thousand droplets of human pain

If only we had been sent rain

Crying children grasping shrunken breast

Empty mothers groaning for rest

Broken fathers clinging to their own

Children alone, with no one to call own

All with sunken eye and tear ducts dry

One was a dewdrop that didn’t look for the fruit of the rain

Overcame her dreadful pain

The star of Bethlehem was her rightful claim

Then surge of human tide

The fruit of the raindrops had arrived

Refusing to be harried against the strongest tide

Her dress no more than canvass sack

Swollen belly but not with fat, naked leg, arm and back

Leather black skin and protruding bone

The Queen of Africa stood alone

This little ship with a sack for a sail

Sailing, sailing, beyond the pail

To save a ship with a smaller sail

With a heart full of dew drops

Under you’re dirty torn sail

Refusing the fruit of the rain drops

As onward you sail

With mother love and father care

As sisters love and brothers share

Now turns the little ship

Carrying one extra small sail

As she’s blown along with love in her sail

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