Scarp that like a scar
Grazes the savannah
Will you not speak?

Your sandstone dewlaps
Drape this land, drunk
With its knowledges

Of dry places. Look!
Your Janus faces crack
With the diviner’s whip.

They tell me you
Harbour a coven
Of nipples, far from

The gaze of rivers
And their tributaries.
The lonely baobab

Which once walked
The road of revolutions
Now looks away, burdened

With its singular survival.
Like a fortress you rise
In the non fog, basking

In the cricket’s motet.
And at the moo
Of the zebu’s laughter,

Pigeons lift broken nipples
To the sun, but those
With the certainties

Of settled belief, block
the rainbow’s
Radiance by the flick of
flywhisks.
All this –  in the shadow
of your plateau.

Oh scarp that wags a tail
At the xylophone’s wail?
Have you no shame?

-L.S. Mensah

It has been the fashion
That on festival days our old men
Smoke the grief out of clay pipes,
Passed from mouth to mouth,
Exchanging snuff and puff as if
They were gossip beads

But all has not been well;
Not for a while.

A very long time ago
The Unmentionable
Came to stay
Even the ritual hyssop bath
Cannot disengage its scent.

In the refractive shimmer of Atlantic
Brine we carve the residual grief
Into portion sizes, so we can swallow –
Bones and all.
Down on the sea floor, yellow-green
Seaweed and mermaids clad in sequins
Weep – each knows it is not a good
Omen to see the other’s reflection
In the faint light.

Every passing hurricane
Is a blood clot shrieking for souls
Every surf that breaks is the sweat
That cuffed itself to the ankle bone
Of an implicated Atlantic
When, once upon a time,
A continent plucked its own hairs.
Today your cannons, facing the sea,
Register protests against the spray,
Against the onslaught of baldness

Every heaving wave is a clot
Of memory, looking to make
Landfall, on a coastline garnished
With undersea ghosts
Waiting to lure the traveller
Into history’s gyre

Elmina
Was ever there a time
When all was well?
I would like to know,
If only to hang up
My goatskin bag of hope.

–L.S. Mensah