Poetry

By

Nana Arhin Tsiwah

SABOU AMENFI
(Recounted Echoes Of A Legend)

I.
i can see the rocks ageing
though they bear your shadow
the calls of your footprints
have numbered hearts.
when i was one; in the crawling bones
i had learned to speak of you
i had listed the countless stories
that birthed from your ankles
Amenfi, only a single soul
fought you before time
when Asante rose with the winds;
cascading the breathless Mfante courts
You: the fears of Anokye
stood with flaming teeth
towering your head above the sky
for in wake and quake; Tutu (Osei) and his flies
clustered under the sun from your yawns.

II.
Asebu; oh, immortal human
a God that sharpened his teeth with gravels
a Being that rinsed his teeth with maize
when Amenfiwaa, your prided half sat in the barn
coal trembled before your eyes
i know history has been a he-pocrite;
yes a she-pocritical insignificance
wasping the cornfields of your left foot.

III.
Just yesterday; in mirrors of suspended water droplets
i saw my lips feasting in Abura Dunkwa
i was in Mankensum counting these rocks again
i could feel within my eyes
the fast moving fingerprints and your palms
the sword of the farmland
sat with echoes of the river.
man has tried ages after your neck
until his infertile land gave in to seed
today; in Asebu— in the trails of Anansesem
time breath through your marrows
sketching mounds and anthills
even as I set arrows in those tapped footprints.

WORDS TO THE SEA GOD

Just maybe I haven’t forgotten
How this day came home
That I still sit under your feet
Inking golden melodies to your daughters…

And just maybe
I have come today too
To whisper voices of my people
Of how we cast nets
To fetch bounty harvests
From your great intestines…

Here I stand head-folded
With pieces of summoned cowries
And grounded shells of crabs and prawns…

Just maybe in this land
We have lost count of your footprints
And we wallow in shallows of some waters
Clamping our fate against the coconuts to fall…

I am here,
As the fourteenth generational soul
Who inherented the great stool
Of the four mighty ‘Kona’ clan…

I pray with my trumpeted voice
Chanting and singing of your might
That your waves shall turn
Not our fate into theirs sands again…

Nana Arhin Tsiwah is an undergraduate student from Cape Coast, Ghana; a disciple of Pan-African consciousness, a cultural ideologist, an awensemist (poet) of different shade but tells of a hunter’s trails for Akanism. He is an orator and a village servant in a poetry movement dubbed; ‘The Village Thinkers‘.