Today I sit here.
Thinking about trees…
About how to forgive a tree.
How do I forgive it for being so easily breakable when I needed its toughness?
For being so tough when flimsy is what I needed it to be?
When our fathers were tied to trees with tree fibre, whipped with tapered sticks within an inch of their lives… Sometimes losing them…
And our mothers’ pregnant bellies stabbed and punctured with sharpened sticks to kill our unborn siblings… and them…
Trees just stood there.
Trees tend to do that…
They don’t listen when you sob for divine intervention.
They’ll provide wood for AK 47s to wipe your village clean of loving parents,
And give orphans wood for coffins if they’re lucky…
Today I sit here forgiving trees for letting our brothers be hanged to death on them without breaking to save their necks from snapping…
For not shielding our uncles as they were given a head start through forests to see if they could outrun the speed of a bullet…
I forgive them for being the strong trusses that propped grandpa’s lifeless, headless body when the Fifth Brigade executed him as he thatched our rondavel before the summer rains…
I wonder if trees will eventually ask for forgiveness,
because the architects of Gukurahundi will do no such thing…
They’ll clench their jaws to the grave, dismissing our pain as a moment of madness, or calling us DDT deserving cockroaches…
Because if humans won’t give us truth or room for reconciliation and confession or forgiveness…
Maybe trees will.
-Frank Malaba
Frank Malaba Prosetry 