Kofi Awoonor

The weaver bird built in our house And laid its eggs on our only tree. We did not want to send it away. We watched the building of the nest And supervised the egg-laying. And the weaver returned in the guise of the owner. Preaching salvation to us that owned the house. They say it came from the west Where the storms at sea had felled the gulls And the fishers dried their nets by lantern light. Its sermon is the divination of ourselves And our new horizon limits at its nest. But we cannot join the prayers and answers of the communicants. We look for new homes every day, For new altars we strive to rebuild The old shrines defiled by the weaver's excrement.

I. Dzogbese Lisa has treated me thus It has led me among the sharps of the forest Returning is not possible And going forward is a great difficulty The affairs of this world are like the chameleon feces Into which I have stepped When I clean it cannot go. 1 I am on the world's extreme corner, I am not sitting in the row with the eminent But those who are lucky Sit in the middle and forget I am on the world's extreme corner I can only go beyond and forget. My people, I have been somewhere If I turn here, the rain beats me If I turn there the sun burns me The firewood of this world Is for only those who can take heart That is why not all can gather it. The world is not good for anybody But you are so happy with your fate; Alas! The travelers are back All covered with debt. II. Something has happened to me The things so great that I cannot weep; I have no sons to fire the gun when I die And no daughters to wail when I close my mouth I have wandered on the wilderness The great wilderness men call life The rain has beaten me, And the sharp stumps cut as keen as knives I shall go beyond and rest. I have no kin and no brother, Death has made war upon our house; And Kpeti's great household is no more, Only the broken fence stands; And those who dared not look in his face Have come out as men. How well their pride is with them. Let those gone before take note They have treated their offspring badly. What is the wailing for? Somebody is dead. Agosu himself Alas! A snake has bitten me My right arm is broken, And the tree on which I lean is fallen. Agosi if you go tell them, Tell Nyidevu, Kpeti, and Kove That they have done us evil; Tell them their house is falling And the trees in the fence Have been eaten by termites; That the martels curse them. Ask them why they idle there While we suffer, and eat sand. And the crow and the vulture Hover always above our broken fences And strangers walk over our portion.

For Chris Okigbo, the well-known poet, killed in 1967 in the Nigerian civil war. That night he came home, he came unto me at the cold hour of the night Smelling of corn wine in the dawn dew. He stretched his hand and covered my forehead. There was a moon beam sparking rays in particles. The drummer boys had got themselves a goat. The din was high in the wail of the harvest moon. The flood was up gurgling through the fields Birth waters swimming in floods of new blood. He whispered my name in far echo Sky-wailing into a million sounds across my shores. His voice still bore the sadness of the wanderer To wail and die in a soft lonely echo That echo I heard long ago In the fall of night over my river, In the distant rustle of reeds At growth in the strength of my river. Once upon an evening I heard it Strung clear as the gong of the drummer boys Bright burnished like the glint edge of the paschal knife, ready anxious to cut My cords and enter into my fields. I was still a dream then Carried by the flimsy whiffs Of sweet scents borne aloft on the vision Of my coming flood That will bear me slowly and gently Into his world of smiles and smells. He was not very gentle with me But I did not complain. The thrust was hard and angry, severing the tiny cord Shattering the closed gates of raffia Gathering at its eye the reeds to feed my fishes. My flood had not risen. The canoe carried on the strength Of his man rowed steep down my river into a tumultuous eternity Of green hills and mountains That reeled and rolled to the river shore To clasp and bear me away. Then the floodgates opened for justice to cleanse to purify My evening of awakening In the turbulence of his triumph Into the bright evening of my rebirth. The birth was tedious The pangs were bitter Into the bright evening I rushed Crying I have found him I have found him. He stood there rustling in the wind The desire to go was written large upon his forehead. I was not ready for his coming I was not ready for his loneliness, for his sad solitude against the rustling wind. I was not ready for his entrance Into my fields and shores of my river. The entrance of raffia was closed closed against his lonely solitude. He stood beneath my entrance In his approach I knew the steps he took Like the departing Lazarus Marching toward his grave. I was not ready. The flood was gurgling at his estuary swimming within me birth waters warmed by his coming. He was silent mute against the rushing of the wind to cry and die for his homeland. My flood had not risen then. Across my vastness he marched into the wind his arms folded upon his chest, his eyes searching for the gates that will open his amulets to snatch and wear his talisman of hope. He marched into the wind howling through door posts to catch the boatman at the dawn point. to ferry him across my river. But I was not ready. My hands stretched to cover his in the darkness, to cover his eyes in the agony of his solitude to call him names I knew to put the dressing from my womb upon his cudgel scars, to hold his hand in the clasp of nightfall. He was mute; the wind had stopped rustling He was erect like the totem pole of his household He burned and blazed for an ending Then I was ready. As he pierced my agony with his cry, my river burst into flood. My shores reeled and rolled to the world's end, where they say at the world's end the graves are green.

Had death not had me in tears I would have seen the barges on life's stream sail. I would have heard sorrow songs in groves where the road was lost long where men foot prints mix with other men foot prints By the road I wait "death is better, death is better" came the song I am by the roadside looking for the road death is better, death is much better Had death not had me in tears I would have seen the barges I would have found the road and heard the sorrow songs. The land wreathes in rhythm with your soul, caressed by history and cruel geography landscape ineffable yet screaming eloquent resonant like the drums of after harvests. We pile rocks on terracing love Carry the pithy cloth to cover the hearths of our mother. Come now, you lucky ones come to the festival of corn and lamb to the finest feast of this land come, now, your lovers have unfurled their cloths their thighs glistening like golden knives ready for the plunging, for the plentiful loving time. To whom shall I turn to what shall I tell my woes ? My kinsmen, the desert tree denied us sustenance long before the drought. To whom shall I turn to whom shall I tell my woes? Some say tell the mother goat she too is my kinswoman elemental sister of your clan But I cannot tell the mother goat for she is not here.

In the east, the day breaks; do not say we have started too early; For we shall cross many hills yet Before we grow old; here the land is surpassing in beauty. Mao Tse Tung 1934 I look out the bars upon the Castle the crust caked row of age in a corner my friendly spider crouches for the unwary gnats of my days. So much there is we must atone. There are spires of faith in the invisible claws of spiders in the flight and curve of gulls. These know, I swear, the contours of the rolling Saharas and the destitute oceans of our history. We sit, debating the charity of our captors. At night lights come on the shoreline bends into a broad bay near the Castle the sea is gray Yesterday it rained on the eve of my forty-first year and left all my defeats intact Let me lead you into the country It is only as half clansman of the ritual goat that I bring my song to the place of sacrifice here in the pain fields asphalt and smoke of a large hearth I lead my rope is short. I shall soon arrive under the tree. I will stage a hundred fights in honor of our Gods and our beloved leader Here, I could care less for the toiling masses I retreated here before Lent to my own stretch of sea front (I cannot see the damned sea because of old caked walls built by Dutchmen) But the shore falls into a deep gulf there are no cliffs. They found a week-old baby buried in a shallow grave on the front lawn of the fort. I want my grave to be deeper. They are sawing through our firewood Today is cassava day The flutist is silent Perhaps his troops have arrived in Georgia Not to arrive upsets me And for the path that I have trod I have no regrets

1. the flat end of sorrow here two crows fighting over New Year's Party leftovers. From my cell, I see a cold hard world. 2. So this is the abscess that hurts the nation— jails, torture, blood and hunger. One day it will burst; it must burst. 3. When I heard you were taken we speculated, those of us at large where you would be in what nightmare will you star? That night I heard the moans wondering whose child could now be lost in the cellars of oppression. Then you emerged, tall, and bloody-eyed. It was the first time I wept. 4. The long nights I dread most the voices from behind the bars the early glow of dawn before the guard's steps wake me up, the desire to leap and stretch and yawn in anticipation of another dark home-coming day only to find that I cannot. riding the car into town, hemmed in between them their guns poking me in the ribs, I never had known that my people wore such sad faces, so sad they were, on New Year's Eve, so very sad.

A name only once crammed into the child's fitful memory in malnourished villages, vast deliriums like the galloping foothills of the Colorado: of Mohawks and the Chippewa, horsey penny-movies brought cheap at the tail of the war to Africa. Where indeed is the Mississippi panorama and the girl that played the piano and kept her hand on her heart as Flanagan drank a quart of moonshine before the eyes of the town's gentlemen? What happened to your locomotive in Winter, Walt, and my ride across the prairies in the trail of the stage-coach, the gold-rush and the Swanee River? Where did they bury Geronimo, heroic chieftain, lonely horseman of this apocalypse who led his tribesmen across deserts of cholla and emerald hills in pursuit of despoilers, half-starved immigrants from a despoiled Europe? What happened to Archibald's soul's harvest on this raw earth of raw hates? To those that have none a festival is preparing at graves' ends where the mockingbird's hymn closes evening of prayers and supplication as new winds blow from graves flowered in multi-colored cemeteries even where they say the races are intact.