Congo Poem by Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah

Congo



From Congo to Zaire
The road is too narrow that, one needs
To walk in naked, but we now in this car,
I see how I am struggling to look through
The windscreen, because of the eddying winds ahead of us,
You look at my face, making me remembering
What that old woman told you, “Do not forget
That you are here as a correspondent.”
We have come to where the children have drawn
The world of the mythological river
In charcoal on the walls. And behind
The bamboos, scarecrows,
We see half the road.
Reading Congo, I read another Frankenstein,
I cannot switch on the lights on this detestable approving roots
Before us. That is not the picture to write
For those who cannot read the language we speak here.
But the faces of these children in Kinshasa are better than
Those we saw in Leopoldville, making me
Looking at Colombia again
In cold-blooded assassinations of artists
For the love of word, you can keep to Bogota,
Because the night is near and the stars will be out,
And our shadows will be lengthened in the lantern,
Where the almond tree has grown.
This is not the time to sing Osip Mandelstam hymns,
Because you have religious Sabbath
And possess paintings from Martinique
For the madness in love,
When you were seduced
For your beauty,
I ended in Katanga.
But you have achieved your images from death,
From this great house, here every experienced pilot
Is a murderer of poets,
The sun rays have entered River Congo behind us.

What are the uses of these papers soaked in the water?
Are these for recycling for the news?
Oh, it is sunset. The sun is purple.
And I am waiting for that old man’s tales,
Here at this ford.
And today, the children are reading the books
You buried in the lake. The flame of their leaves
Are blue, the love you have longed
From this verandah we sit on,
That is why I have burnt more than
Thirty there pieces of my paintings
In these savages of the ripened November
For our ancestral life in the multicultural world,
I seize the tears in your eyes
For the lives in the in the valley beneath you.
The old man is coming in,
In the shadows of souls who are breathing
With uncontrollable tongues,
For dissolving hills which are blocking the sight
Like a spinster on doubted reflections,
The towns are far in decaying harvest.
And what this old man will tell us,
Of this undulating landscape, I cannot tell you
When the guava trees are the anthills
For a tourist’s posture, ancestors’ shadows
Are buried in you, my unified exercises,
For the School boys who are eagerly
Writing your life with hunger’s salt.
There are no rites for the shameful rivers we cross,
That is why we carry our skulls in one bag,
We are relearning our histories,
And how to write them
For a sacrificial crow,
I am in the womb of the earth,
I can feel the dewdrops on me,
My memories, that open door,
A face is coming out, from a cobweb.
Wait! Folkman, let me fetch my torchlight!
The darkness on the fragmental plains
Is washing away
Under the whitewash,
And the Belgium flag is waving
In the silent world of snow,
Where blind visored faces
Have lived for many centuries
Without maps for the sea,
And till the tension of this new migrating footprints
In this wet soil,
Becoming the pages
Behind edges of questions for another equinox,
This language we speak across
The engulfing country
Will be the passage for a divided life.
Remember, the roots are like a coronet
We walk on, are the taste of water
We yearn with falling in love
For my seaward, is always like writing
A letter to alcoholic painter.
Now, quenching our thirst with poems,
From the direction of the tide,
You hear the women going,
Carrying pots,
Laughing, chattering, my clansmen are still drumming,
The dancers are on their feet, their breasts
And buttocks, shaking in the air
By the side of the bonfire with a fixed looks,
I smell a local brew, I find you
So intoxicated, your nest, behind an eagle,
Procession of thunders, here I see
The primitive fever, glowing in the fire,
The day is drifting away
Into the veiled shadow of a cave,
I am satisfied, I am happy,
Under this ceiling, for my end
Which being among archipelagos.
The schooner is always my walk,
My false limestone of sculpture piece,
Evoking an adulterous affair,
We endure and explore my personal
Disintegration between two rivers
Ahead of us, for the remains of refugees.
Look, man! Are you naming this regenerating swamp,
A place of souls?
Let the rain fall, when the clouds are still black,
And our time will be occupied
By the plantations of seedless crops.
And that mark you draw at the bottom
Of this depth for a shape in culture
For our women here, the train
Has taken over the metal teeth,
Becoming waves, breaking
For unfashionable number of passengers
That you transferred
From the deafening winds,
The songs, their water falls, with on voices
Like your Hemingway hero.
Because nothing is so beautiful than the silence
In the mountains in us we feel,
That is why I always tell you that
Pictures and books not for ignorant.
But here our pictures are in the hands of illiterates,
The elite,
For the spoilt children we bring them up,
I smell this vomit of corn food again,
And walk through the buffeted rains.
I am wet, rain-water runs down my chest,
The branches of these white papers are wet,
Are clear before us, like unshaven corpse
Still in exile, you are starving in exhausting occupation,
Becoming something lucrative
Than writing poetry when the sacred salt
For the soul’s journey illuminates a child.
A child who has never known its water fever before
And the approaching exercise of love,
These images on the slope towards home,
Growing into archetypal graveyard
In our own ancestral lands
For the cheated tribes of refugees
Who are surviving the cyclical notes
Of the music on your guitar.
Sometimes the smoke from the mountains,
Ascending we see here
Through the dark clouds of the rains,
Making me think that
I am climbing another mountains in Nepals
For a walk in the salt mouth,
You write
For changing body, the cleft,
From the dance music. Although the street lamps
Attract the sleeping moths
From the sun cities,
But this stricken mud transcends the souls.
Here you are a foreigner,
And I, a native.
But there is no difference between us,
Because both of us are strangers
To this unapproachable landscape,
Only a look at unconscious sexual attitudes
With quixoting clouds,
We have made our way over Justice Shallow.
We are still hunting the stone-mine
In El Dorado,
Let Katanga
Be our next door
Before the empty and wasted sea
Cover the printed valley
Through the clouds
Of a philistine indifference to art,
I drink my coffee behind this religion,
Becoming the seasons in this village.
However, the peasants here
Are our Sundays,
To calculate the months you have designed
On stamps and calendars
For the waiting broken skeletons in the lizards.

We have arrived in the frozen forest,
Where dead are not mourned
With an arm stretched, a tributary of River Amazon,
You are not tried of these streets,
Because my yellow ribbon of islands
Is not giving a dull silence
Like Mendelssohn’s hand without
Remembering the tomato sauce we ate,
With no cause of unchaperoned vomits,
Our desires for cheap faith have taken a shape,
The villages have come to view like the congregation
Of stairs buried in the rain clouds,
We have become use to grouping with our hands
In the dark world,
Where light is always a cutting stone.
And further from River Congo,
Where the wreaths of the earth stretch,
From the absence of shadows behind the rocks
For your victims of paranoia,
Not because of Marta Abba’s love,
Because I am still fighting between my live for art
And my love for a woman,
Here my kinsman’s hands have seized the waist of the water
Beneath the villages, soaking the chalk in the tide,
I see the old forest again growing for flowers
For a path between the two valleys
That leads us across the elevation,
The windowpane becomes our limit.
We still hear the growling noses in the soil,
Original rotting sapling, the black gospel,
Nailed behind the white horizon
For the black spirit,
Leading you homeward.
I have borrowed that direction
For the dark Arctic world with august customs
Of Tundras, the globe in Africa,
Representing my second home,
You are taking your Akan lessons,
And I, waiting for my Russian translator woman,
I open the albums of yellow sun,
Your eastward makes you more tropical
Than black falls on the back,
Meaning the death of our second birth.
The night witches are marching towards the villages,
Next before us, we shall soon arrive
On the orphan mountains with pasted souls,
You will climb the generation’s amnesia
With spectacles of panorama,
My toothache is transfiguring my vision.
I need extra ember before I can close
This book and lock the monster with toothless cuts,
In the world where everything is too old and for the coloured sea.

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