For Solo and Gladys

Solomon, it rings a bell.
Solo, a face that has disappeared from my thoughts.
Only the echo of Zac’s voice across the garden.
“Solooooh”
Only the black and white image that Jillie took.
Gladys.
Her girls.  Names forgotten.
Letters from a childhood.
A beautiful teenager runs away
Leaving her sister.
Away from fathers and grandparents.
Away from narcissism and cultural traps…
Only to be trapped in a place
Where the cruelty persists.
A place where hunger rules
Shadows dance.
Poverty.
Flee from the huts, from the mealie fields
From the mound of stones covering the skeletal body
Where the glint of sunlight remains.
Run.
 If only you could be found.
I swallow.
A  sudden slap of memory
At 2 o’clock in the morning.
Prayers for a life squandered
By the statistics that rule our reality
A life unknown, a life disappeared, a life impossible to find.
If only you have escaped the statistics.
If only I could know.
If only I had been older
I would’ve saved you from them,
From the statistics that shatter.
From the fate that took the sunshine
And placed it on the rocks.
A young boy’s voice echoes in my mind…
“Solooooh.”