When I got around to finding facts about you Graça

you had been one of my heroes for decades, but I was

amazed to know you were younger than me, just eighty!

I have taken 84 to do so much less. Your years are weighty

With achievements: taking the Mozambique Primary School

Attendance from 40% to over 90% in your political rule

As minister of Education; First Lady of Mozambique while

Your husband was alive; The UN asked you to compile

Out of your experience, “Children Involved in war” that deals

With kids made to kill; you helped to make women visible

As citizens, freeing them from marriage when children, setting

Up The Graça Machel Trust to continue your unfettering

Of children and women throughout Africa.And you endured

to become an Elder, bringing common sense to human

folly. Your years are hung with trophies and honours. But

what fixes you in my heart are the years of no mounted

memories when you were married to a man who found

that being a marxist ruler made enemies you were bound

to kill, to whom disloyalty meant death, whose state

fought child soldiers with child soldiers. It is too late

and disrespectful to ask questions about what you thought

and said and did then, but in the thinking of much wisdom,

the saying of much love and the doing of much goodness

you will have asked these questions with your own shrewdness

and learned your truth, which shines the brighter for having

a little shadow to set it off, for me at least. If only mine was as

small a shadow and as encompassing a light, my sister, Graça.