APOLOGIA CONCERTO: KWAME
(for the centenary of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah)
the sounds of drums invite you
Kwame, your birth-cord calls you
On this market day at this market square
At this market time on this market soil
I stand, I scream, I call
Rolling your name in the drums,
Rumbling the atimevu, playing the ki- din and Sogo
Roaring your name in the tiger-drum. . . laklevu
Kwame ee. . . Kwame ee. . . Kwame ee. . .
On this market day at this market square
At this market time on this market soil
I stand, scream, I call
the sound of drums
Kwame, your birthcord calls you
The goat went to eat the cassava peels and the
Cassava peel swallowed the goat and joined us
To find the missing goat that must be given to the gods
For your much needed return;
A lone giant iroko stood at our public square
As to its companions, I doubt if one exists
But it told me that Mahogany, Sapele, Wawa and Odum
Were its classmates but left him alone when the
Great fire went astray and penetrated our village;
Lost in the shopping mall of discarded ideas thrown away
By dogs that jujued my people and advised us to come
And take their medicines which was a fiasco,
I invited my kinsmen to a feast of songs of despair
In the smelling mist of powdered hopes,
That’s why I invite you too, to stand on the rainbow
And ride back with the squirrel’s speed through the deserts
And bamboo farms around the moon that and died lived again
Only in our minds. Come, let’s recall our appellations and learn
New praise-songs for those who will soon resurrect and stand
So tall, so giant, so glamorous
In the midst of the storms which we nearly endured
Come, fertile head without a kwashiorkoric symptom of
Horrifying dreams of castrated fireflies; that woke one
Day in a land and saw it can’t return
Come to the banquet of apologetic songs: Apologia Concerto
At the village square, in ashes and sack- cloth wrapped
Around the waist of our memories in the whirlwind
Of the rising sun;
the sounds of drums invite you
Kwame, your birth cord calls you
I stand, I scream, I call
On this market soil at this market time
At this market square on this market day
I roll your name in the drums
the sounds of drums invite
Kwame, your birth cord calls you.
19/ 03/ 2010 Legon.
