Praying with Our Feet

These people, white people, were living under a lie. More, they were, in some profound way, suffering for the lie. They had seen more of the world than I had- but not more of humanity itself. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates

That first morning of the first work week of the restored and hopeful New Year

With heart inflated with gladness, and buoyed with communion and community

I was swept by a black tide making its ways to the shores of gainful employment

And I was complicit, a freshwater dancer myself, I was affected, I was drenched 

There we were, humanity itself, washing over the rolling tarmac of Jan Smuts Avenue

Stern faces taking work seriously in a country with a knee-buckling unemployment rate

There can be no buckling knees when the mode of transportation is one's own legs

A resolve momentarily broken to buy magwinya and scones from the local vendor

The rigidity of faces and bags clutched tightly under arms from economic opportunists

Betrayed by their bodies swaying to an inculcated cultural cadence like the ripple of a wave

But have you seen a black person walk? Oh, what a song of skating on invisible ice that is

We are Miriam Makeba's Pata Pata people, and we playfully surf the turf, a walk, a two-step

A symphony of a gait, nayi le walk yom'hlaba, a commute turned into a mighty perambulation

Thank you, Moonchild, and you too Unk for a response to trying moon cycles, we walk it out 

We are terrestial people, of the soil, rest assured Adam was black and blue for being cast out

Beyond all attempts to cast us out to the edges of existence, we belong to the land and it to us

Although we have to wax and wane our physical bodies into and out of the sight of whites

Although we hold inequality in our hearts like the sheer face of a slippery escarpment

We've turned our blues into songs that keep the spirits buoyant, giving hue to skies and seas 

Our humanity is fathoms deep, si no buntu, thina abantu. We, the people traipsing over tightropes

Unlike Johnny of new, our elegance is in the rhythm we bring to daily human tasks

Like Johnny of old, our beginnings have been humble, a fishing rod in hand, he walked

And God has made us, the people of the very beginnings, fisher of the men of yesterday 

To cast our nets of hope wide for humanity to breathe again, we walk still, a testimony

We are the metronome which times the rising and the setting of the sun on long days

The shadows that stalk the hearts of men fall a few shades lighter for me, I recognize

The case of employment has been a light mist and not heavy droplets of sweaty labour

My shorelines are littered with shells of autonomy, air-conditioning and AeroPress coffee

In the ways that matter most and ultimate, the soul ways, I am surrounded by MY people 

I've climbed into this skin with pride, this pigment of humanity, melanin of metanoia

Breaking psychologies of death with the resilience that terraforms the soulless, occupy stars

Solzhenitsyn's line runs through our hearts as well, our palms are white from drowning our own

But herein lies the difference: We, with all our flaws and missteps, we are the people with faces