Your Daughter is Hurt
Your daughter is hurt.
She takes advice that breeds
no connection to her happiness.
As a child, her age shames her.
She compromises things that should make her love.
So, instead of loving, she takes Truth into her vein.
As she grew, you taught her to grow beyond
the ways that should connect greatness.
But what practical route does she take?
You made her live on the cotton fields
and, while she associates, they say
She’s blunt — bad for stating preferences.
Have you forgotten she carries Truth in her vein?
You should have shown more of the way, mother.
So, why did you let her sink?
You didn’t teach her to swim by the lake.
Why didn’t you teach her that men only love girls who can give them their guts?
Why didn’t you tell her that friends
will unlove her and feel insecure if she protects her world?
Why didn’t you tell her that suitors will get caught up if she puts her head up high?
Why didn’t you tell that
the universe in every person
she meets will want to take a turn
in the flesh of what she preserves.
Your daughter’s heart is
a big room for chaos.
Her soul tortures.
Her stomach, a battle field of pain
Her mouth of impeded words —
heart litters loneliness.
What heart is free from affliction
if not a child’s.
Lord, make her wear it.
The He(ART) of Giving
I don’t know what dad saw
that made him drop some money into a man’s bowl.
I was too little to understand.
I talk of stories I have heard about giving
and once, it seems so unclear to me.
When you help, aren’t you helping yourself too?
Would you say you don’t think of the benefit
you’d get when you drop some notes into a beggar’s bowl?
You’ve been told that the giver receives.
So, a beggar helps you secure a seat in paradise — your help is being reciprocated.
You open a restaurant. Why?
To help. You feed people and their hunger flee for a while—a fire that flickers.
You get your promise—you receive.
And those people help you secure a seat in wealth.
You start a transport business to convey people to a destination—they pay.
You help them through and you get your promise: they help you secure the path and like
Armah would have it, nothing destroys the soul like its aloneness.
You build an industry.
You are so kind that you employ the unemployed and you get your promise: their brains for your growth.
Now, I see what dad saw:
A pot of gold for a giving he(art). And whosoever gives, gets more in multiple.
Could daddy be resting in paradise now, because he got a seat secure for him?