From Frisco once
we drove across the wide yawn of the breezy bay
to the Oakland home of Mike who fixed
a memorial dinner for his years among our people
5 They call for song and I sing the story
of our wounds: the failures and betrayals
the broken oaths of war leaders grown smooth
with ease of civil joys
They laugh they clap they call for more
10 For a change just a little change I sing
your dirge about their land’s defeat in the beauty
of her dawn: the ghost of Harlem standing guard
across their bridge of mirth their launching pad of dream and myth.
I sing also your long lament for Grand Geronimo
15 Amerindian chieftain who opened his heart a bit too wide
the lonely horseman who now perhaps only may be
still rides his old stallion across their dream their myth
forever riding his memory among mirages along eternities
reserved for him among snowfields spread across the breast
20 of the Earth this Earth and all his Earth.
Halfway through the songs I see the folly
and the wisdom of our choice in the cold stare
the shifting look in the eyes of our hosts our very kind hosts
Who are we to throw back at a man the image of things
25 he strove so hard to burn to ashes in history’s bonfires?
We know there is an agony in waiting for the long distance runner
who breaks the finisher’s line for the judges to declare he
jumped the starter’s gun stepped upon some other
runner’s toes threw him off balance and off the race
30 And what is a race, Cousin, without the rules
without other runners
But leave him alone leave him alone to his
glory looming large above his olive dreams.
Kofi Anyidoho
Kofi Anyidoho is a Ghanaian poet and professor of Literature. He has received numerous awards for his poetry, including the Valco Fund Literary Award, the Langston Hughes Prize, the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award, the Fania Kruger Fellowship for Poetry of Social Vision, Poet of the Year (Ghana), and the Ghana Book Award.
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