The Obama Serenades

Cape Coast, Ghana

At Cape Coast,
we bowed our heads
in sorrow
and shame,
recalling the agonies
of our forebears…
the wicked complicity
of kinsmen
and sometimes
even parents…

At Cape Coast,
the ghoulish stench
of slavery
stared us
stiffly and
morbidly
in the face,
flaring up
our nostrils
to the wrenching
point of
hyperventilation…

At Cape Coast,
we were weighted down
with the bloody crimes
of yesteryear;
still,
almost senselessly
and capriciously,
we either flatly failed
or rawly refused
to grasp
this bleak season
of misery and
abject penury
was wrought
by ourselves
upon
our own kind…

At Cape Coast,
we could only
half-fathom
what was
and what might
have been
had there not
been…and then
staggered
by the stygian depths
of such epic
savagery,
we could not
hold back
our tears,
those tears
which were not
really our own,
but those of
our forebears
in eons past,
callously wrenched
from their moorings
and rendered
beasts-of-burden
by those pale-skinned
blue-eyed men
with frozen veins…

At Cape Coast,
we were shackled
and packed supine
as sardines
in urine and
human waste,
bound for
chain-gang labor
in the Carolinas
Georgia, Louisiana
and Mississippi,
shorn of our clothes
and tongues and
names and
dignity…

At Cape Coast,
a disoriented
mulatto class
was spawned
mimicking
every misdeed
of those blue-eyed
creatures of
yonderland,
while retaining
almost none
of whatever virtues
with which they trod
our shores…

At Cape Coast,
time and tide
came full circle
even as seller
and sold
stood
face-to-face
like total strangers
staring
at the horizon
with a young
orange-sun
beginning
to rise up
once more –

7/10/09

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr.