mother says
we should let our older sister
go and live with the thing
she calls a boyfriend
that once she knows
what it is like to hit her face
in the ground and taste the dirt
and grit with her own mouth
that once she has had hunger
for breakfast
and a blue eye for dinner
she will come back
with her tail in-between
her legs like a dog
but mother doesn’t know that
sometimes we are all like that
we all try to look for our fathers
in the mouths of other men
we bury our morals behind trees
and hide them under rocks
just to feel the warmth
of someone who pretends to love us
I try to tell her
that we have never known
our fathers
and the ones she has managed
to gather and tie down
with child support
throw money at us
instead of love
that the men she has picked
to father us
call her a witch
I try to tell her
that we have had to father
ourselves and each other
and sometimes we just want
to be soft without a reason
I want to tell her
that we have to work twice as hard
to feel the warmth of the sun
and on days like these
we just want to pry the earth clean
of its beauty
and dance until our feet hurt
until we can feel the air
on top of the trees
without being called
the daughters of a witch.
Veripuami Nandee Kangumine is a writer and poet from Windhoek, Namibia. Her poems have appeared in My Heart In Your Hands: Poems From Namibia (2020).