With a smell of my mama’s breast milk;
And a t-shirt or occassionally a shirt in my mouth;
Crunching and crushing it with my two little teeth;
The only teeth I had had, in Zulu we call them abathakathi;
With no pants, just a diaper that had inherited a new color;
I was living a sedentary lifestyle; But what nobody tacit, I’d started working; My career in writing had instigated, already. I was doodling and scrawling on the floor, In my mama’s stuffed little rondavel; Nicely polished with a cow muck; Mama cooking on a three-legged pot, On wooden fire, unfettering a pungent spiteful smoke; Or sometimes washing dishes, On a cream-white pail, that was once white, But now, tainted by the smoke. I paid no attention, I got used to it; It was my daily perfume; All I cared doing was to doodle squiggles on the floor, Scribbling whatsoever I wanted, the way I wanted it; With no rules for syntax and spelling.
It all looked like noughts, or infinity signs;
But meant the world to me,
And I could perceive what each nought meant;
And if I could speak, I’d declaim it out loud;
Nourish the people from my demitasse of gen;
Quench their thirst for knowledge,
And I’d let em gulp from my rivulet of wisdom;
Those noughts were my insight;
And they were foreshadowing my writing career;
And Yea! I am a born writer
