Young poet mourns Rawlings in 4 quadrants

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.

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 & 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 recognize 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.

Starred excerpts taken from L.S Mensah's poem, To the Volta. (According to sources anthology, 2015.)