A Rain Cloud is a Ballot Box

A Rain Cloud is a Ballot box

Of our unanswered prayers.

It’s the evening news bulletin

In the living room of our fears.

Of blood-stained headlines

And men without heads walking

The thin lines of poverty.

 

Today’s weather forecast

Says the sky will rain bodies

Of men

Dying of thirst

a scattered thunderstorm

Of fathers who could not provide

For their families in the famine.

 

It’s becoming all too familiar

Wiping innocent blood off

Corporate windshields

Multi-billion

Dollar operations while Earth floods

Like a dirty sink in a hair salon

In this harsh climate, both

a prediction and a curse.

 

Brothers whose alluvial bones we sucked

Water out of like sugarcane,

There is a kind of geometry to suffering.

Black and brown crops and corpses

Blowing in the wind.

Mothers with cracked nipples

All splattered on the pavement

of political promises

 

We plant each of our bloodied limbs in soil.

Hoping that food will grow between the elbows

Of our sisters’ hopes.

While first world leaders seed fund

pollution.

They ignite the fires of advancement

Only to leave

Africa in the smoke of retribution.

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