Poem for a Missing Person!

My mother, she is a matric-fail
But she reads newspapers well, every morning
Before we could wake up and disturb her
With our petty demands for a day to start!

She reads it for us, picking news of killing
Helping us digest the scores of missing
Sentence to sentence, word by word
For names and organizations
Like her favourite weaving threads
With twisted threads ready to warp and weft,
Entwined between her seasoned fingers
For her favourite fanek
And mapping it like a plain we could live in.

Shredded and torn, that’s how we find the newspapers
Each morning, and she would read aloud
Audible enough to the entire locality,
The moment we scratched through the remains.
Bemused, we brothers and my little sister
Would searched for our inventory of peoples killed
Or either missing, for yet another morning
Of listing, for the record!

Today morning, a got a called from my father
Saying, my mother went into hiding last night
After serving him the best of ngafak kangsoi,
With our inventory! My father’s worried.
He said, ‘my name is in the newspaper!’