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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