In the cave of my bedroom, slumbering to sleep

I often listen to poets whose verses force a grin or a weep.

Lesego Rampolokeng and Lemn Sissay stopover

To deplore, in the manner of a knowing griot-warrior,

The Boer’s logic of hate and Anglo racism of late

Meles Negusse tells me about Mammet’s flight

Into the Red Sea, about her escape from the emperor’s morbid gape,

Although playing hide and seek with lovers – who worship her wisdom,

Actually teasing them, biding time

Until wounds wringing in lies, patch up by the salt water’s coral gem.

In the background, I hear the Chinese poet Bei Dao murmur startled

‘When the Cape of Good Hope has already been arrived’

Why the heck take the vessels to wreck in the Cape of Death?

But today disaster has struck, bringing close the twilight

Kofi Awonoor has left this life, in an unscheduled flight

To join the other life that may be gentler and eternal.

I wept, I will not lie

So many memories come by

One of 2007, when on a beautiful summer’s day we congregated in our garden

He started singing songs of freedom; whistling and chanting like a contented nightingale

Still with a raw anguish that somehow balanced the scale

Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the wood,

Words I didn’t fathom then but wish I could.

Summers later yet another beautiful day, sitting in his home in Accra

Hearing my long story of the container-prison – our present day Naqura

I saw his protruding eyes flamed red,

Like roasting grains of red flax seed

And so, vainly though,

I had to withhold the news about the hiding of Mammet,

The mythical muse of the brave, who vanished in the custodial make shift cells of iron and steel

Artfully designed by fatalists with a license to kill,

Alas, how hard it seems to believe in the wood and how easy to deceive and steal.

Were the Nairobi butchers thinking?

If they were thinking, what was the purpose of their doing?

If there was a purpose, what was the logic of the ugliness –

Beyond its deadliness?