🔁 tipape matayo ReCircled: “Silent suffering Shoulders: The Weight of Manhood on a Fatherless Boy”
tipape matayo@tipapematayo437098
1 day ago
A BOY IN SAVANNAH
Born to shackles,
not of iron or steel,
but of circumstance—
invisible chains forged in silence,
tightened by poverty,
by absence,
by the cruel indifference of fate.
Lucky Dube was right.
“Born to suffer,”
he sang,
and the boy—
barefoot in the dust of the savannah—
knows this truth not from lyrics,
but from the ache in his bones
and the hunger in his belly.
A boy, self-taught,
not by books,
but by the harsh curriculum of survival.
His classroom:
a leaking roof,
a cracked floor,
a mother’s weary sighs
echoing through the night
like lullabies soaked in sorrow.
No father to guide him.
No man to say,
“This is how you stand tall.”
Only shadows where a role model should be,
and the weight of manhood
dumped on his fragile shoulders
like sacks of wet cement.
He is depressed—
but who listens to a boy’s silence?
He is anxious—
but who sees the tremble in his hands
as he grips a machete
to clear the overgrown path
to a future he cannot imagine?
He is scared—
but fear is a luxury
when you must fetch water
before sunrise,
when your mother coughs blood
and you don’t know what it means,
only that medicine costs
more than your monthly hope.
But does he know?
Does he understand
why the world turned its back
before he even learned to walk?
Why his youth
was bartered for survival
in a market where childhood
is a currency no longer accepted?
His age mates laugh,
play football on dusty fields,
dream of cities,
of love,
of freedom.
He dreams of rice and beans
on a plate not shared.
He dreams of sleep
without the gnawing guilt
that he didn’t earn enough today.
His youth—
a ghost that never lived.
A chapter skipped
in the book of his life.
He is a boy in the savannah,
but not of it.
The sun scorches his skin
not with warmth,
but with reminders
that even nature
does not cradle him.
He suffers—
for a cause he doesn’t know.
For a war he didn’t start.
For a legacy of broken men
and broken systems
that made his birth
a sentence.
Yet he walks.
He carries.
He endures.
Not because he is strong,
but because he must.
Because his mother’s eyes
still hold a flicker
of belief in him.
Because the world,
though cruel,
has not yet crushed
his last breath of defiance.
So see him.
Not as a statistic,
not as a sad story,
but as a boy—
a soul—
a flickering flame
in the wind of despair.
And if you feel nothing,
then perhaps
you too
were born to shackles
of a different kind.
---TIPAPE MATAYO.
#poetry
9 hours ago
