We lie apart
Faintly breathing while some of our parts are being wheeled in many a cart
As our French hands are being butchered and battered
Our English legs are being pulled and broken
Our beautiful teeth, given us by Odomankomah, are being dug and stolen
Our wide eyes are grimly made dim and frozen
As our minds watch the chronics, with tears so cluttered!
Who, to us, this much pain chattered?
II
Needs hover like disgusting flies
Still hate baits in horrid lies
Soiling the chatter of liberation
Grumbling drum atop nightingaling voices
…which seek to better ailing heads
Yet snakes rake our cake and burn our souls on stakes of the fake
As they pose our comrades thinking they have better sheds
…and so care not about our best choices
III
Half calabashes whose halves have been ferried abroad
Great wits whose souls cry from across covered dirt
Subdued dignities which kneel in front of cornered aggression
Ours which are given out to be begged for
Ours which are always stolen to be moaned for
Ours which are murdered to render us desolate
Ours which crow well to be burrowed in the follicles of foes
Ours made mad to be trained to turn our haunts
Ours which are rewired to be our crosses and taunts
Ours which are placed on fun pads to preach us ridicule
Ours which are never ours until our esteem prostrate before weaker estates
…even then, nil to sour fates
Ours which wear “theirs” to tatter us
Simply ours not ours but paraded to clown our needs
Why are we in this desert of criers?
IV
I feel punched in the poetry of Senghor
I am bleeding at the murder of Sankara
I lie buried in the murders of our best
My buttocks hanging in the air like Nkrumah
Made to be overthrown by his own
To live like a burden disowned
I feel the fury in the death of Sylvanus Olympio
The hurts in the unfair death of John-Aguiyi Ironsi
I feel the anger in the murder of Marian Ngouabi
From Richard Ratsimandrava
…to François-Ngarta Tombalbaye
Murtala-Ramat Mohammed
…to Teferi Bante
Anouar El-Sadate
…to William-Richard Tolbert
Ahmed Abdallah
…to Samuel-Kanyon Doe
Juvenal Habiarimana
…to Laurent-Desired Kabila
Right to the pride of ancestors whose souls still weep for their bodies
I feel them all like venom in my veins
Still, the haunting murder of my soul is sorrowfully garnished by the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi
Where lives my land on my land?
Where is my stand on my land?
Where works my hand on my land
Where is my band on my land?
Cedi suffereth violence at the hands of dollars
…faces death threats coming from the mouth of pounds
Is jeered by the taunts of the euro
Taking slaps out of the claps of others who act traps to bait our state
Where am I on my land?
V
Blindess parades to aid the shady!
Greed dances to the whims of the mischievous!
Corruption hunts us from the catapults of protectors
Where lies my land on my land?
My mirror announces the greying hair
Which surpasses my mother’s in a trying dare
Next will be weakened bones
…on top of worried thoughts
Breaking me into three
…then maybe four
Before crippling and bundling me yonder
Where questions will remain questions without answers
And ferry me to the courts of my ancestors
Whose disappointments stare even from queer realms
It sure is a conundrum which strain on pains on complaints;
This here Heritage I wear
Amoafowaa Sefa Cecilia © March 24, 2021
Mum Cee 