I am stumbling over the tongue of my father and his father
before him I am falling
into the calcified palms
that bound them all
in razor wire. every time
I try courting syllables my tongue is cut
I cannot speak.
My memory
reels back
to when we were bats
drifting in a white haze
tongues long unfurled
from the girth of the mutuba tree.
Never mind
that we wrapped our dead & covered our loins, still with her bark
yet somehow, our shame we left unclothed.
earth sopping in bone-lava us burning us failing to decide
whether it was dirty whether it was a sacred purge.
whether our soil should wash itself, and if so, with what. if the rain that fell
was bullets with a mouth
to eat out our souls?
We never decided. &
poison mushrooms sprouted questions
to jeer at us:
Perhaps if you whisper to history like a man does to a woman
she will lead you to where the spool of wrong started
& when your children tongues un-maimed find you,
they will pulse & dance to the right lines
Lillian Akampurira Aujo is a 32-year-old female poet and fiction writer from Uganda. She is the winner of the Jalada Prize for Literature 2015 and the BN Poetry Award 2009. Her work has been published by the Caine Prize, Femrite, BN Poetry Award, Prairie Schooner, The Revelator Magazine, Sooo Many Stories, Bahati Books, Jalada Africa, Transition, Omenana, Enkare Review, and Brittle Paper. Her poetry has been translated to Malayam, and is set to be taught to Grade 8 students in the Philippines for a Contemporary African Poetry class. She has been a mentor in the WritivismAt5 Online Mentoring program.