Poetry

Theodosia Salome Okoh

By

Nana Arhin Tsiwah

WHERE HER NAVEL FELL

(A lonesome monody to the Ghanaian Statewoman and designer of the Ghana National Flag, Theodosia Salome Okoh who passed away at age of 92)

The sun has come home
Singing of pain and blood.
The moon has lost her cheerful ring
Holding her breast in a calabash
Of dry palm wine and squeezed kola….

Another day has folded her sorrow in our hearts,
The sand of evil and darkness has fallen into our eyes.
She, the black Obaatampa tree
Has fallen to the shouts of the cold winds of the Atlantic…

The monogrammatic letter of the casket,
Has reported your farewell chorus.
The epigrammatic tales of you at the cemetery,
Has found a hole to hide your cold tears in me.
I wish to ask one thing of this master;
Why let this day of unawares catch me before light?

The colours you forged in it purest gleam
Beams on the verandah of Independence.
The paint you poured into the eyes of the Union Jack,
Sits with the imprints of Nkrumah in my archives
Waving and fading into the eyes of time.

Though I would have loved to write you a song
And have your autograph embroidered in my face
Of how beautiful your soul was,
But death like the drums of the cemetery would say;
“When holds something at grip, none can take it back”…

Farewell, glorious blood—
farewell,  kindred soul—
farewell, warmth heart—
Your imprints have left the hunter with
Dotted indelible trails to follow to the land of birth
Okoh, farewell
For your tears, I have sucked them into the belly of Ta’kora…

WHEN A POET DIES
(In memory of all dead poets)

I know this tongue might sound too plain
And thinking the pavement wouldn’t be painted
It flows in the mind and releases at shore
These thoughts, these ratiocinations
Like premables that wrote the half night
They might be a rhetoric, a salad for salivation
But, sometimes you may have died
Thousand times before your consciousness could coup

This stage is a calling, calling for scaling
A calling not for the saint nor the hero
This stage speaks with passion, fashioning the soul’s words
Like harmattan and pharmaceutical
They are simply indented aphorisms
Leaving their scares at the door of the mind
But like a tale, only few desire to be sanctimonious

How many times haven’t you, they and we sow these seeds
That not even the fire-fly of the night
Desires not to pour it benediction upon it for germination?
How many times haven’t they deserted
The carings and comforts of their pillows
Stay awoken by mosquito bites of heralding crickets
To sing us songs of consolidation and steadfastness
That at the last whine of the cock
Nothing was heard except their last farewell prayers?

In this calling of many and few; of few to many
Only the world knows how many were properly autographed
So behind the scenes of lava bombs and cinders,
Their sweat only paid due respect
We of whom they died whilst altering pages
And summoning all lost hopes for this future and world
Only paid their trails with cleansing pigment

Once a poet lived by this sheet
He had predicted his own fate in a calabash
Prayed his last stanza in a foreigner’s land
His home, wife, family, royalty and friends he foregone
To bring peace and hope to the many who ate missiles by day
As predestined by his own golden ink,
The morning came, night rained tears
And his last was left in the open houseflies
He had no mourners, no sympathisers
Except the moon and the seven-million stars
That visited him before the maggots could draw out swords

Three hundred years from now, from today
His tales have find it sweetest tune
In the hut of an Open University
Where with time count; men, women and children
Came to sip wisdom and to philosophise
From his now glorious skull
So I ask: was this not he who was left to tell his story in vacuum?

For this time again, this infamous hour
Those who shall die this lonesome path
Shall be immortalised by this same breathing lines
Where lives live by cyberspace click
Like a carpenter’s hand stricken hammer
But when a poet dies,
His beginning is gone, into ashes
His end a tale that acknowledges not his sweat
Smeared on the pages that hangs on to life

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‘.