Inheritance Poem by Meena Kandasamy

Helplessly, silent;
we watched it being seized away, all our lands.
The Government—a fulltime bewitching whore
had promised Jobs. Industrialization. Power, Electric.
Everything went, Nothing came.

Now, landless, uprooted,
unsettled in a resettlement colony
we feast our souls on lucent memories—Of an earlier life.

When memory charts
familiar horizons
I often recollect that
long ago rainy Sunday
in our crowded church,
Fr. Jose reading crisply
“Blessed are the meek
for they shall inherit the earth.”

(First published in Sweet Magazine, South Africa)