Dialogue in the near future

Son: "Mom, can you teach me a folk song?
I hear our great grand parents liked humming them,
and waking up with a jembe and a basket in the a.m.
early in the morning to sow seeds into the earth,
is it why you wake up and go to work after the morning bath?
and you come home so tired and downcast,
is that hasty-ness part of the culture?
that was engrained in you by the fore-fathers?
I also hear. . .
Is it true that they killed each other with pangas and fires?
All because of skin color and different attires?
Were they that unconscious of their own reality?
Because they were caught up in small trivial matters?
or were they drawn to the flesh, as a confirmation of their bestiality?
I hear that arts and music were dis-merited, like clothes with tatters. . .
Was the world that lacking in our Kenyan vitality?
And teacher taught us about Jomo Kenyatta,
and Dedan Kimathi and one Tom Mboya,
he said that they were our heroes and brought a light to the manyatta-
A symbol of our culture which with new-found independence
she said,
would bring us good harvest and freedom of self-reliance,
and  then on the news I see a black man fighting in defiance,
as if he did not get a piece of this promised independence cake,
or do I take it to mean that we still have our own rights to take?
as if we are to fight our own individual wars?
I thought that the MAU MAU fought for our humanity that was at stake?
Or was it just a series of battles, won but only for the pause?
And now we have vultures, pressing play without a pause,
playing the same game that the other team was playing,
Mom is it just the same people behind this veil?
And why do so many people seem so frail?
As if their bodies are too weak, to find a way to the peak?
I look at them and they seem so dead, gazing aimlessly as if they have nothing to speak. . .
Mom, when you were young did you ask these questions?
Is it what the old people ask, while surviving on their last pension?
I thought they say time will tell, that's what the old people say,
but old people live in the past, so what would a time machine say?

Mom: (in hushed mummers) "you are too young to understand"