THE SILENT DRUM

She wore her blackness like the robe of the sun,

Till silver-tongued strangers came, promising a brighter dawn;

They chained her tongue, stole her seeds, and called their darkness light,

While her children lost their names, their songs, and ancestral sight.

Her golden soil wept red beneath the stranger’s iron hand,

Yet she nursed the wounds of children scattered across the land.

Her drums grew faint, her languages faded like smoke into the sky,

Her farms became forgotten graves where ancient harvests die;

But stubborn children rose, black roots gripping the earth below,

To wake their wounded mother and make her lost spirit grow.

From coast to coast, the old tongues whispered beneath foreign speech,

While grandmothers guarded dying stories no classroom could teach.

The crown took gold from her mountains, the ship took sons from her shore,

The whip wrote laws upon her back, yet could not kill the soul she bore;

Her diamonds glittered in distant halls while hunger walked her streets,

And the hands that fed the world were left with empty, trembling seats.

But Africa remembers—her soil has a memory deeper than the sea,

And every buried seed still dreams of what her children can yet be.

So rise, Mother Africa; let the talking drum reclaim the night,

Let forgotten names return like stars and teach the young their ancestral light;

Let farmers bless the red earth, let artisans awaken sleeping hands,

Let every tongue once silenced rise like thunder across the lands.

For though the stranger planted mirrors that made her doubt her face,

Her stubborn children now gather the fragments and restore her grace.

THE END