Dzimbadzemabwe

“But Mama, how will they know I came from rock?

From Pangea’s outbursts that stood up to tsunami waves?

Granddaughter of magma, conceived in tectonic shifts.

If you break me off your back, I become a pebble lost at sea

And how will they know I came from rock?”

The waves, they laugh at me

Pummel me back and forth till my sharp, strong, jigsaw edges, 

Edges molded to fit flush in the concavity I left in your side,

The edges that shaped me in the story of my home,

Are beaten and battered off me till I am smooth and undefined.

“Your edges are dangerous,” the waves said.

“They will cut our fish.”

And so I stumble forward, afraid and ashamed that you’d barely recognise me.

How will my smooth, rounded form ever fit back in your jagged side?

Do you know I came from rock?

From the altar that the morning light prays to, as he splits the sea and the skies.

A fortress, a resting place for time and age,

I too, would be ruler and power and infinite,

Unafraid of your rising tide, if I had a piece of earth to sink into.

But the rock stares at the pebble in envy.

“Oh what I would give to be so free.” she says.

“To lean into the ebb and flow, 

And travel to a thousand horizons, 

crashing on shores like the waves do.”

On and on goes the debate between humility and sacrifice,

For the rock has lost parts of herself that the pebble might find life.

But am I destined to limp in gratitude, 

Find my future in the aimlessness and call it freedom?

Knowing that the children I will one day break off my own back

Will be just but grains of sand strewn across foreign beaches in total ignorance,

Never truly knowing the history and reason and beauty in their coarseness

Wearing their own gentle, jagged edges, in ways I never had the courage to.

Each gentle, jagged edge - a whisper from my mother.

And living her dream, yet sadly unaware

That they too, came from rock.