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 up news of the killings
Helping us digest the scores of missing
Sentence to sentence, word by word
For names and organisations
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 still read aloud
Audible enough to the entire locality,
The moment we scratched through the remains.
Bemused, we brothers and my little sister
Would search for our inventory of peoples killed
Or either missing, for yet another morning
Of listing, for the record!

This morning, I got a call from my father
Saying, my mother went into hiding the 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!’