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the
visibility trigger/a poem for kwame nkrumah
By Edward Brathwaite and so
they came up over the reefs
up the
creeks and rivers
oar
prong put-put
hack
tramp silence
and i
was dreaming near morning
i
offered you a kola nut
your
fingers huge and smooth and red
and
you took it
your
dress makola blue
and
you broke it into gunfire
the
metal was hot and jagged
it was
as if the master of bronze
had
poured anger into his cauldron
and
let it spit spit sputter
and it
was red blue black in my face
it was
as if a maggot
had
slapped me in the belly
and I
had gone soft like the knead of my wife’s bread
i
could hear salt leaking out of the black hole of
kaneshie
i
could hear grass growing around the edges of the green
lake
i
could hear stalactites ringing in my cave of vision
bats
batting my eyes shut
their
own eyes howling like owls in the dead dark
and
they marched into the village
and
our five unready virginal elders met them:
bowl
calabash oil carafe of fire
silence
and
unprepared and venerable
i was
dreaming mighty wind in trees
our
circles talismans: round but round village cooking pots
the
world was round and we the spices in it
time
wheeled around our memories like stars:
yam
cassava groundnut sweetpea bush
and
then it was yams again:
birth
child hunter warrior
and
the breath which is no more
which
is birth
which
is child
which
is hunter
which
is warrior
which
is breath
that is no more
and
they brought sticks rods roads bullets straight objects
birth
was not breath
but gaping wound
hunter
was not animal
but market sale
warrior was child
that is no more
and i
beheld the cotton tree: guardian of graves
rise
upward from its monument of grass
crying
aloud in its vertical hull
calling for crashes of branches: vibrations of leaves
there
was a lull of silver
and
then the great grandfather gnashing upwards with its
teeth of roots
split
down its central thunder
the
stripped violated wood crying aloud its murder
the
leaves’ frontier signals alive with lamentations
and
our great odoum
triggered at last by the ancestors into your visibility
crashed into history
* *
* * *
Source: Black World •May
1973 • Vol. XXII No. 7 • Chicago, IL 60605
posted 25 March 2006 |
