Scorn of The Immortal Child

A sort of ancestor veneration in reverse

The contract was signed in life and blood long before either of us came to play our parts

The legacy of your lineage 

The sliver of life your soul sees after your body’s final death 

You all were meant to think of me 

honor me

I am the bringer of the future

a dream held close to your chest 

Yet no offerings were left at the altar of my birth

What taste do I have of your victories

The dust of toil dries my tongue like raw palm oil 

Thick, coating my cheeks and gums with sticky dehydration

“what happens to a dream deferred”

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I foreshadow the world you leave

You have conquered me and conquered yourself 

You scorn me so i scorn you

And cut the line so this blood may never know immortality

It seems Wisdom chased you your whole life

But I, the child, left to the wayside, was still enough to embrace it

This child may well burn the village to feel its warmth 

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I was named in a dark room but christened by the early sun 

As was tradition

So now you may call me by a name and what else

When I trip over it’s syllables and piece its sound together into   

A roadmap to guide me gently back home, to a house that barely exists

More a shriveled dream, a tombstone of what was left to you

How long until that too returns to dust

May the ancestors receive only the abundance they left

May they never know the pain of it squandered potential

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So you say: continue the tradition that has atrophied,

Its muscles made soft by my forefathers

So should I carry the mantle you found too heavy a burden to bear?

How will I raise the next child, with no home to cultivate them

What offerings do I make to the future, with no fields to harvest, 

no seeds to plant into nonexistent soils 

How will I sing them to sleep with no language to sing our songs of sorrow

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So I bare my teeth

Hungry 

Sheltered by the landfills of your piled waste

On a washed out road turned red with dust 

the color of my rage, the color of your passings, the color of violent endings

Forgotten

But not yet dead