The today - draft 3

There are mornings yet to come
We make up songs to sing

Today we scrub
Tomorrow
We will get her through tomorrow

Let our collective energy
Be enough to get her through the night
We hold each other

What will we have left of him
If we erase the blood stain
We scrub and we are afraid
Girls will jump rope here
And not remember his name

We used to love
We used to laugh
There are no hymns to hum as we scrub
Today we take turns scrubbing stories

Stockings are a joke a memory a luxury
Skirt and shoes
It is everything to brush teeth
Put on lipstick
To speak
To pray

Our lives
Our bills
Our sex
Our relationships
Our work is a codine blur
We robot through
With her
With our sister

We can't keep track
Back to black and red so fast
From blue to green to brown
Too many colors

This is the rainbow Ntzoke called enuf
We secretly hope the fumes will kill us too
But we breathe
For her
For ourselves
For him

This is no mother's duty
Others walk by like this is common
We scrub the cement walk with her
With borrowed prayers
We lift skirts and fold up jeans
Bend to knees both hands on brushes

Head over red bucket
Filled with tears
With Pinesol
With ammonia
With bleach

If she is that boy's mother
We are all that boy's mother

Breaking news at ten or not

Daddies fall to their knees
Mamas cry

Shot on the way home
We have heard this story before
Somebody shot him about to jog up the steps
A ten year boy who did nothing
But play basketball around the block