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Four Poems

by Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah

 

The Tempestuous Three-Legged-Chair

It sits in an empty hall.
In a highly individualistic posture,
characterised by thick impasto
and agitated brushwork,
its shadow stretches like sea waves,
hitting against the walls.
Someone will love to sit on it,
but its convulsively compositional rhythms
diisturb man’s footing, coming in,
the creator allows its passage
to fall into Correggiosity of Correggio.
A birth from a very soft painterly style.

 

Joshua Tree

Remember the piled lights faintly floating
on the heated sand leaving
jostled stems,wet roots and dried leaves
behind in the deep grave month.
April is dragging its weight
among many things to remember
I keep the fleeting glance

 

The Gun

At this early age of 103 my grandmother still carries her gun (a pistol,
hiding in her clothes) about in the house.
The gun is 81.
Though it’s not functioned before,
it’s now the first estates of her belongings.
They say it was giving to her by her grandmother,
who had carried it for so many years
unknown to her,
it’s now ageless.
In the kitchen dressed like a nurse, she prepares
my morning tea with cakes and coffee,
it lives on the ebony table
closer to her life more than before.
Maybe she’ll pull the trigger today.
Maybe she’ll dust it after
slicing herself like lemons.
Maybe she’ll call me back home
and teach me how to prepare its soapy water
for the regions down below the open window on my left.
Our neighbours in the house don’t understand why she spends
long hours cooking for me and my mother.
when my wife lies in bed reading long novels.
Perhaps I’m the only grandson among her thirteen grandchildren.
Perhaps my mother is her only daughter among her five children
who was saved from the last rubble
when my only daughter and only child died
after seven days from birth.
Perhaps she’s growing white
and she won’t allow my wife
to touch me again.
Maybe I’m her gun.
Maybe I’m her eyes.
Maybe I’m her land,
she writes long letters
for we to return home.
She’s measuring the size of the house
and prepares her soapy water.
she’ll whitewash the stain walls with yellow paint.
I’ll be the first grandson in that house,
I’ll be her last grandson.
I’m her gun.
I’m her land

 

Lovely Kissed

TWILIGHT under her armpit
hearts & kidneys
in words
one collecting least gathered
ten homers
in kerb drill
to manage
your black fabric body
on board
from my valley to your cleft