I came back decades later to rooms she cleaned

in ruins of a homestead on the River of

my Country. Cast iron gates built on years of

bumper crops, golden fleeces, free labour, swing

open on rusty hinges like pages in an unfinished story.
Native grasses reclaim the popular lined path to

the manor and bluebells grow across unmarked graves

in the garden of the mansion of many rooms that

sucked youth from Black women till there

were no more many hands to make light work

and it all fell apart.
I was a child when Aunty sat me on her lap

and told me of this life I didn’t have to have.

Days rising before the sun, endless baskets

of washing, ironing, mending, tending babies

born to rule, of bent backs, fingers worn to

the bone, floors scrubbed, linen starched, shirts

pressed, broom straws and dignity worn to the nub.   
She never told of hungry nights in cold rooms

listening for every creak of the floor, every

shadow passing the door might enter rooms of

sleeping servants. Years later I read about that in

someone else’s archive and raged at what

happened between these walls when I could

afford feminism, Marxism, humanism and every

other ism built on broken backs of last generation.
Lacking her generous spirit that forgave the past

I came back to scream at the walls, rage at the

silence. I walk towards boarded windows, locked doors

and an old straw broom worn to its nub, fifty years

out of her hand never did clean the blood from the

land or the stains from their hands. I come back to

this ground of unfinished business, leave the gates open

when I leave – swinging on rusty hinges.