9.0820° N, 8.6753° E

The pain had hit, wrapped in confusionShifting pelvis and the smell of zinc,My womb cracked back, pushing out,Pushing forth a life.For that life I would do anything,I closed my eyes and saw the history of my future,How I would teach that life everything I knew.But my breath grew colder, slower.I knew I wouldn’t see my future grow up.With my last breaths I pushed my soul up to my maker,Who had so cruelly snatched me from my young.Stuck up above, I watched my young evolve,About as invested in her progress as one rooting for a team, my growing dream.She was subjected and demoted because she was ebony,With ivory beneath her soils and oil dripping from her chin,With bounteous green hair and earth-coloured skin,With her rivers that flowed and met within her lands.She begged, pleaded, wrote and applied,And one day her master said, ‘I’ll leave you alone to survive’She ran with grateful long strides, to her independence.By the time she got there, she was out of breath,Unable to stand alone, Unable to bear her home.Her leaders traded her, exploited her, never replenished her‘look at your mates, they are so much better’ they condemnedWith their green passports they never used till they met her,Their imported roaring vehicles filled with another man’s oil.I watched as she was robbed of her oil and resources.I watched her hair turn grey as she turned fifty-five, but she was never allowed to grow.Three hundred and seventy-two million feet treading upon her,Polluted, Scorched, stereotyped and maimed, never alive.And when she dies, I won’t be here. Many of us won’t.