Ballad of saltwater children

Sarpong Osei Asamoah

 

The blue halo of the Middle Passage is a borderless noose
I beat the water till God fights back;
till my shadow is his musket militia.

In the long cemeteries inside the gulf of Guinea, near Ghana, God is a shadow of a
____headstone;
God calls out to me, I answer: new phone,  who this?
My prayer is a border encircling my old master’s white cemetery trees.

Every hour of every day here, in Cape Coast, haunts the
bones & makes its home, of mirrors, there.

Wet soul spume at the shore of sekondi~Tarkoradi;
The lather limps like cemetery insects broken by torrential rain.
There’s something in the water at Elmina that poisoned the fanti mermaids.


Sarpong Osei Asamoah is a Ghanaian poet. He has worked at literary organisation such as Tampered Press,  the Library Of Africa and The African Diaspora, and the Contemporary Ghanaian Writers Series.

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