Jacaranda Tree

Mother Africa chronicles series

“When things fall apart, the children of the land scurry and scatter like birds escaping a burning sky.” NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names.

I can almost see it through hazy memories.
Showers of purple indigo blossoms,
flowing like a Persian rug on the hard grey grovel.

The season never did tarry;
Like the lost children of the diaspora,
Visitors in the motherland and
All but strangers in the foreign lands.

Today my heart is homesick.
It yearns for the birth-land,
For the rugged dusty terrain I called home.
Lined with majestic purple Jacaranda trees.
It longs to sit on the veranda and feel the reverberations of laughter,
To sigh in contentedness with a sweet rooibos tea;
In the city of kings,
The city where the sky is always blue.

Yet the echoes of laughter have become cries for justice,
Oh that freedom would prevail in…