African Poems Archive: 2016

Sunday 11 September 2016

Bodies, Flowerbeds: A Villanelle by Viola Allo

Bodies, Flowerbeds: A Villanelle

The earth, carved up, engraved with bodies,
this hollow vision of death: people resting
together, bodies beneath a bed of flowers.

We soften death into poems and stories.
The art of writing is just a way of wailing
for the earth, carved up, sculpted by bodies.

In Cameroon, hair from the dead is carried,
mixed with camwood and kept; the living
remember bodies beneath beds of flowers.

What we seek through our endless studies
sits beyond death, but the path to it is sinking
into a carved-up earth, paved with bodies.

The sharp shovel of silence briefly remedies
the ear deaf to the voices of the dead, linking
it to slender-petaled tongues in a flowerbed.

A poem or a story is an etching of memories,
dignity in the fragile face of loss. Soothing
the earth, carved up, engraved with bodies,
we hum together beside a bed of flowers.

Viola Allo

Viola Allo is a Cameroonian-born poet based in the United States. Raised in Cameroon by her Cameroonian father and American mother. In 2010, Viola received an Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation fellowship to attend the UC Davis Tomales Bay Workshops. In 2011, her poem "Nigerian Girl with Calabash" was published in US Poet Laureate Kay Ryan's community college poetry anthology, Poetry for the Mind's Joy.

I Want You to Know by Micere Mugo

I want you to know
how carefully
I watered the tender shoots
you planted
in my little garden.

Flowers now adorn the ground
the fruits are ripe
Come
bring a strongly woven basket
and bring with you also
the finest palm wine
that your expert tapping
can brew
we must feast and wine
till the small hours
of our short days together

Joy and love
shall be our daily
harvest songs.

Micere Mugo

Micere Mugo is a Kenyan scholar playwright and activist.

Saturday 6 February 2016

Voluntary Exile by Jumoke Verissimo

Voluntary Exile

You who ate the light of the sun at dusk
the age of your fears is in my head
I have seen the consent in your eyes
ditch thoughts have formed,
water makes a skin on your malar.
But your lover is not a goddess,
Yet she melts you into a wraith,
like the fabled water mermaid,
who fell in love with a village pauper,
she leaves food by your door at sunset
strange meals to be eaten like communal sacrifice,
to welcome bust dreams to again reinvent themselves.
I see you no longer smell suspicion
even when the dog eats your flesh,
you have become the dog in the flesh
do I hear you pray that morning should heal you,
as you are dead before death comes to take you.
I see the desks have become coffins too,
in the night of the land, fantasised lover
and leftovers of meals abandoned before flight
hurry into the ambitions you eyed before hegira.
I have entered into your ache. I can see embers
of the future cauterising your heart,
faster than the burning of a desert sun.
Tonight like every other night to come
as the wind drops down the trees,
and leaves hug and lean on fresh twigs
and branches gather strength against the wind
you embrace returnee memories in your arms,
under the shelter of tarpaulin housings
you stay awake with your biography.

Jumoke Verissimo

Jumoke Verissimo is a Nigerian poet and writer. Her first book, I Am Memory, has won some literary awards in Nigeria. Some of her poems are in translation in Italian, Norwegian , French, Japanese, Chinese, and Macedonian. She was born on 26 December, 1979

Letter to My Nephew (For Ken Saro-Wiwa) by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

Letter to My Nephew
(For Ken Saro-Wiwa)

The sun is locked in evening, half shadow
half light, hills spread like hunchbacks over
plains, branches bowing to birth of night.
It’s an almost endless walk until the earth

opens up to a basin of water. You gasp
even the thin hairs on your forearm breathe,
flowers wild, two graves of man and wife
lying in perfect symmetry, overrun by wild

strawberries. Gently you part the reeds,
water claims the heat from the earth, you
soak your feet, then lie down hands planted
into the moist earth. You glow. Late at night

when you leave, you will fill your pockets
with wet clay. But many years from now,
you will try to find a perfect peace in many
different landscapes, drill water out of memory

to heal wounded limbs of the earth. You
will watch as machines turn your pond
inside out, spit the two graves inside out
in search of sleek wealth. Many years

later, after much blood has been lost and your
pond drained of all life you will wonder, shortly
before you become the earth’s martyr, what
is this thing that kills not just life but even death?

Mukoma Wa Ngugi

Mukoma Wa Ngugi , is the son of renowned African writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Born in Evanston, Illinois, he grew up in Kenya and is the author of Black Star Nairobi (2013), Nairobi Heat (2011), and Hurling Words at Consciousness (2006). He was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2009, and the Penguin Prize for African Writing for his novel manuscript, The First
and Second Books of Transition, in 2010. He teaches at Cornell University.

Heart’s Eye View by Niyi Osundare

Heart’s Eye View

Left Paris
Several heartthrobs ago

Past Madrid
Now flying over Marrakech

One fast sweep
Over the sprawling Sahara

And on to the angel
Waiting by the sea

Every wingstep brings me
Closer to your wondrous arms

Niyi Osundare

Niyi Osundare was born in 1947 in Ikere-Ekiti, Nigeria. He is a prolific writer and highly valued literary critic. In December 2014, Osundare was awarded the Nigerian National Merit Award (NNMA) for academic excellence.

My Africa by Dei-Anang

My Africa

When vision was short
and knowledge scant,
Men called me Dark Africa
Dark Africa?
I, who raised the regal pyramids
and held the fortunes of Conquering Caesars
In my tempting grasp.
Dark Africa?
Who nursed the doubtful child
Of civilization
On the wand’ring banks of the life-giving Nile,
And gave to the teeming nations
Of the West a Grecian gift.

Michael Dei-Anang

Michael Dei-Anang (1909-1977), Ghanaian poet, playwright, and novelist, was born at Mampong- Akwapim, Ghana and attended Achimota College, Ghana and the University of London before entering the civil service, where he served in several ministries in the colonial and post-colonial periods. He was one of the main pillars in Kwame Nkrumah's African Secretariat, which was mainly concerned with the liberation of the rest of Africa still under colonial rule. He was arrested and detained for two months after the fall of Nkrumah in 1966.

F for Figs by Jumoke Verissimo

F for Figs

You tell me certain foods are for gods,
a taste and my powers may abound too.
I have eaten no figs, but I have longed
though I always kept your thoughts in tethers,
tied to the root of the land I have loved
and like you I found figs are fruit for the gods
that in dreams men can get fed a kind
to awake at morning with insights of spirits
I will sleep this night and await the dream
Of remaining a patriot with a soul in flight
To arise each morning
and go through the day
for those other things
I have returned with the tired back of the street
to sleep
and again dream the dreams of the land
and talk of wadding the storms or clichés like it.

Jumoke Verissimo

A Poem For Sarah Baartman by Diana Ferrus

A Poem For Sarah Baartman

“I’ve come to take you home –home, remember the veld?

the lush green grass beneath the big oak trees

the air is cool there and the sun does not burn.

I have made your bed at the foot of the hill,
your blankets are covered in buchu and mint,
the proteas stand in yellow and white
and the water in the stream chuckle sing-songs
as it hobbles along over little stones.

I have come to wretch you away –
away from the poking eyes
of the man-made monster
who lives in the dark
with his clutches of imperialism
who dissects your body bit by bit
who likens your soul to that of Satan
and declares himself the ultimate god!

I have come to soothe your heavy heart
I offer my bosom to your weary soul
I will cover your face with the palms of my hands
I will run my lips over lines in your neck
I will feast my eyes on the beauty of you
and I will sing for you
for I have come to bring you peace.

I have come to take you home
where the ancient mountains shout your name.
I have made your bed at the foot of the hill,
your blankets are covered in buchu and mint,
the proteas stand in yellow and white –
I have come to take you home
where I will sing for you
for you have brought me peace.”

Diana Ferrus

Diana Ferrus, born on 29th August,1953 in Worcester; South Africa is a Poet, Author and Artist from Cape Town. Most of her work revolves around marginalised African women’s rights. She is especially known for her poems about the slave woman Saartjie Baartman.

An Elder’s Prayer by Bai T. Moore

An Elder’s Prayer

Oh great Spirit of the forest,
I have nothing in my hand
But a chicken and some rice
It’s the gift of all our land
Bring us sunshine with the rain
So the harvest moon may blow
Save my people from all pains;
When the harvest time is done
We will make a feast to you.

Bai T. Moore

Bai T. Moore was born on October 12, 1910 in the town of Dimeh, a Gola village between Monrovia and Tubmanburg in Liberia, and died in Monrovia on Jan. 10, 1988. He studied at Virginia Union University and returned to Liberia in 1941, where he served the Liberian government in various posts while writing, promoting the Gola, Dey culture and the general cultures of Liberia. Bai T. Moore became Minister of Cultural Affairs and Tourism under the government of Samuel K. Doe, a post that he served in diligently until he died in 1988 at the age of 79.

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