If I could fly back once more, may I follow old fly-paths, may I swoop to watch the head butting dance of mudskippers beneath your bridges, it is a sad truth about the trajectory of flight that whatever goes up must in time descend -L.S Mensah.
Let’s look at this without a quadrant in a dense region of chimney mist you shuffle your feet grudgingly against the turf of smoke there is no clumping, no going only the flailing & swirling of drowsy limbs striving to gather up themselves again while another region get 24 months of harmattan you will not understand how much ache we bear beyond finality.
April rains arrive with dread, thunder-howls; silver ribbons intermittently bracing the clouds not withholding the cataclysm and sweet petrichor at sundown we are responsible for the blight.
There is no way to understand this. For instance, in the 4th quadrant there are many steps to the cradle, turn upon turn, each inserting into themselves paths intertwining, paths interlocking, paths intersecting… death & peace & salvation walking through themselves with their habits you may recognise their gait by the declaration of the white plover, returning from the fanfare of bones.
In the 3rd quadrant
The summit is a place of thick, thick-plump shadows like the darkened city of elms we search for asters to which ones befit these drooping rims in those nights of vesper bodies walk clumsily on the broken stairway. With the warm caress of my palm, I shove your delicate pieces, sedan of bones, I lift you into the nightly glow of the tabernacle.
Gently, gently with a cool solder I lay your groin in the heat & weld the overstretching crease where the crevice is hollowing into the forge.
That with able feet you may leap beyond the 3rd the long queue protruding the doorway behind mire & vermilion coal, to which stoic bodies grow weary with pain.
Step, step, hop, hop & jump into the 1st you arrive in the dark day of famine under the eucalyptus, despite the drought the sacred leaves spurt tenderly above your head to retell of hunger on the sickening patch in Dzeluokope, these very fingers have tilled the same furrow a son is sailing under the evening tide he’s yelling beneath water, beyond our sightlessness drumming inconsolably against his belly telling the route the maize would bend from the despoilers but we cannot hear.
If you could fly back once more, may you follow old fly-paths; may you swoop to watch the head butting dance of mudskippers beneath your bridges. It is a sad truth about the trajectory of flight that whatever goes up must in time descend.
(Bold excerpts take from L.S Mensah’s poem, To the Volta. (According to sources anthology, 2015.)
Gabriel Awuah Mainoo, special prize winner of Soka Matsubara international Haiku contest, Semifinalist of the Jack Grape Poetry Prize and winner for authorship and creative writing category for 40 under 40 2020 awards is the author of ‘Travellers Gather Dust and Lust’, ‘Chicken Wings at the Altar’, ’60 Aces of Haiku’ and forthcoming ‘Lyrical Textiles’. He serves as project manager for Ghana Writes literary group, creative editor for WGM magazine and, African poetry editor for Better than Starbucks, USA. Mainoo has featured in/on The Cicada’s cry; USA, Attempt at exhausting a place in Leicestershire, London, Writers Space Africa, Missouri Baptist University’s Fireflies’ Light, Haiku universe journal, Kalahari review, Ghana Writes journal, Canada’s Event Magazine, The Haiku Foundation, Wales Haiku journal, The Mamba, Better than Starbucks, Latin America journal, Malawi’s Nthanda review and elsewhere. He’s been included in Best New African Poets 2018 & 2019 anthology, Bodies & Scars anthology; attempt at exhausting a place in Leicester volume, Black Bamboo anthology, Poetry Leaves bound volume, The Cicada’s Cry special edition; moon, Quesadilla and other adventures among others. Mainoo is a tennis player in the morning, a student in the afternoon and writer in the evening. Mainoo is a Master of Fine Arts candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University.
©️ Gabriel Awuah Mainoo
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect The Chronicle’s stance.
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