He used to sleep with the stars above,
Crickets singing their songs of love.
His hands, cracked like the sunburned land,
Held the soil like a father’s hand.
Up with the dawn, down with the dusk,
He whispered prayers through fields of husk.
A simple man, with a sacred call—
To feed the mouths, to care for all.
But now the farm hums a colder tune,
Under wires that steal the moon.
Barbed wire like a crown of thorn,
Where once grew maize and newborn corn.
Security lights pierce through night’s veil,
As if goodness itself is set to fail.
Dogs that snarl where lambs once played—
The laughter of life now deeply afraid.
His children tiptoe where they once ran,
His wife clutches hope with trembling hands.
Each knock at the door may be the last,
Each breath is haunted by the past.
For shadows come not from cloud or tree,
But from those who say he should not be.
“This is not your land, not your skin,
You don’t belong,” they scream within.
But oh, how deeply he belongs.
The veld sings his grandfather’s songs.
He knows each bird, each stone, each tree,
Like scripture carved into memory.
He’s buried kin in this warm earth—
Each grave a testament to worth.
They loved the land not for power or pride,
But for the peace it gave inside.
Now that peace is butchered and burned.
The tractors rust. The cattle turn.
Slaughtered not for need, but hate—
A twisted echo of the nation’s fate.
And who will mourn the one who feeds?
Who kneels beside the soil and bleeds?
Not the minister in his polished shoes,
Who sips and signs and turns the news.
We ask, is life so cheap, so small?
Is silence all that answers the call?
One farmer dies, and with him a stream,
A valley, a future, a generational dream.
We lose not just a man, but a world—
A flag of peace that’s torn and furled.
This isn’t about colour, it’s about breath—
The sacredness of life, and unjust death.
God did not shape the earth for war,
But for each soul who labours and sows and adores.
And when you kill the farmer, you curse the grain,
You drain the rivers, you birth the pain.
The earth now weeps in hidden groans,
As if mourning for her broken bones.
She cries not for drought or fire or flood,
But for the farmer’s silenced blood.
He asked only for the right to live—
To wake, to sow, to raise, to give.
And if he must be remembered at all,
Let it be not in numbers, but in the fall—
Of every harvest lost to fear,
Of every life we failed to hold dear.
Let justice be not a whispered word,
But the loudest cry the world has heard.
For when we forget the ones who feed,
We’ve starved far more than just our need.
