SHAFINAAZ HASSIM

Take your freedom and run with it.
Take it into the hills,
where the tall grass is still green
and the baobab’s arms wide open.

Take with it, the dreams that we scattered
in finger-paints and sandy colours
reminiscent of too many rising suns,
too few pinkish horizons,
and majestic oceans
that reach for the sky
when the full moon bares her bosom.

Take your freedom and run for it,
leaving all those hopes, drenched, salty,
white blood and red.

Dash forward to a dazzling future,
abandon anxiety,
pick mercy off mango trees,
lick the juice of festive ignorance off the litchi.
Go, go ahead. Seek new brilliance,

push forth into Utopia, go only
where everything is Beauty,
and nothing reeks of rancid indifference.
Take this, this fading freedom, and run.

Originally published in Soul Seeds for Shade & Solitude (2014)