A lake formed from the black voltas
Bowl lying at the Upper tip
In a crossroad, called Wa(come),
Owning a spreadsheet of Land,
Sissala to the North, Lobi to South,
And Flooded by cordless blood.
A windy air blew up calluses of kinship
in a morning tide,
Carrying all the juicy portions of culture,
And roughages of fertile ties
Into a galavanting wind;
Bandwagoning Dagara to the West.
Why would it become empty?
But to create cracks of crates,
Grouping Kwabenas (sons) here,
Abenas (daughters) there,
furrowing pleasant eyebrows.
She looked with an open eye,
Cloven closer to its dry banks
Like Mighty Janjan Pond in harmattan,
Yet so apart like Tibanga Tuo
When crisis beckons.
What’s a cultural bond to a WhatsApper?
A once illustriously illuminating kinship
Peaked in a big Tower of Tendaalung,
An offshoot of a broader Baking Clan,
Lighting corners of Upper West,
Binding Suuri(s) and Puohu(s) together;
A placental fiber,
Stronger than ligature rope.
No! She isn’t a love poet, nor a flower bed,
Yet she connected hearts,
Stitching souls,
And conjoined bodies into a single
family bowl.
Here, in this bowl;
A brother shared a brother’s glory,
Painted a whole community’s mood,
Celebrated a brother’s daughter’s name.
Here, in this bowl;
A brother’s toil is shared,
A cry, a sister’s shoulder ready to bear,
A community’s firmament of mourns.
Here, in this bowl;
An uncle unveiled his merriment to
An orphan’s perching hive,
A cousin’s achievement eulogized
in a crowd’s corner,
Here, in this bowl,
A morsel of history
Sewn-in the hearts of trees,
Remembered by generational leaves.
Here, in this bowl;
Formed an epicenter of Tradition,
Where cords of folklore crisscrossed
Like a vertical sliced Orange.
Now, the bowl has broken,
Facebooker calls it OLDEN;
ARCHAIC swelled up
In an Instagramer’s finger;
Yet Widaana never died.
Now, inside the broken bowl,
PRIMITIVE coiled in a Westerner’s lips;
ANCIENT pegged on modernity’s tongue,
LOCAL occupied technology’s mind
And yet Suuri clamped in nativity.
Houses lost their common bond to fenced yards,
Societies separated by boundaries
Of Religion’s concrete walls.
Cooling wattle and Daubs,
Squashed into molten Iron hubs,
Rising into unknown heavens.
Our curated modern towns of nothingness
Trudged by imaginary time-lines,
religion took it toll, punching societal mores,
A nation’s muffling glory;
A dimming history subdued into
Neighing colonial dialects.
Oh! What a lost HOME?
A COMMUNITY, full of pure values,
Culled into festivals, music
And dance
Lost its course to a pejorative time
of Modernity.
©AL LATIF KAMBO-NAA