TO THE BLACKS UPROOTED

Sisters and brothers turned strangers in the strange!
Mothers and fathers left lonely in old gaols
Sons and daughters growing in deserts of hatred
Think not you are cursed
Lament not your dejection
For if time will peel history backwards
It would reveal your mountains of love
Turned pain and sadness in your grand ancestry
As your pots were forcefully captured
Into painful planting whose fruits did you bear

II
Did you know?
Did you know that
Mothers cried until dehydration fried them in dungeons of death?
Oh fathers wept and neglected their shame, forgetting “Bɛɛma nsu”
Some hanged, others died of shock
Their hearts shattered into pieces
Fighting and failing and running and saving… some
Unsealable holes were left in hearts of brothers and sisters
Who stared vacantly hoping their loss would be returned
They wore mourning as skins until their generations quenched out
Even we, green leaves replacing vanished browns,
Have never forgotten

III
How can we ever forget shadows of our ancestors
Who hid in caves to our lineage save?
How can we forget those whose mourning was tarnished
By the need to ever flee?
How can we forget those who built on rivers and turned warrior architects
Moving from settlements to settlements
Like lost ants who can’t locate their sunny holes?
How can anyone forget their thoughts of being caught like rabbits
And skinned, and eaten?
Who can ever forget their brothers or sisters or mothers or fathers?
Blood is a sea with no divisive rivers

IV

Don’t you think if fate would have it
This ink will sink to clear our link in a blink?
Don’t you know?
Don’t you know if we could
We would hoe the ground to reach our foes who made you kowtow
To their crow selves so low?
Don’t you know the unknown if known
Would have been blown into pieces to you shown in rescue?
Don’t you know tears piled on fears at your caught?
Don’t you know hearts still yearn for your brought?
You royal black seeds uprooted and turned weeds in strange lands!

V
You’re all royalty!
As slaves turned royals and royals turned paupers!
You’re all royalty still yearned for in asamando and this living here!
You’re all royalty no matter how scattered or tattered
Strange sands have made you
It is an order irreversible
But blackness lives in relations
Each and everyone as sibling or child
Mother or father

VI
So stop, look back one last time
And heed to Nkrumah’s words
“Forward ever, backwards never”
Chasing dreams hitherto impossible
Even as monsters of racism and drugs chase your strength
And your dignity and your beauty
And your handsomeness
And your curves and your wholesomeness
Blood in black,
Build in the physical Martin Luther King’s dreams
And put an unerasable smile
On his gone face
Long live blackness!
Long live Africans lost to past monsters!
Long live you and I
With skin blessed melaninly
For we are rulers! Rulers the future has enstooled!
Amoafowaa Sefa Cecilia © March 28, 2019

Photo: Google Pics