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Ghanaian Author, Award Winning Poet Gabriel Awuah Mainoo Of UCC Mourns Jerry John Rawlings

Egressing in quadrants for J.J Rawlings
Ghanaian Author, Award Winning Poet Gabriel Awuah Mainoo Of UCC Mourns Jerry John Rawlings
14.11.2020 LISTEN

If I could fly back once more, may I follow old fly-paths

may I swoop to watch the head butting dance of mudskippers

beneath your bridges. it is a sad truth about the trajectory of flight

that whatever goes up must in time descend*

Let’s look at this without a quadrant

in a dense region of chimney mist

you shuffle your feet grudgingly

against the turf of smoke

there is no clumping, no going

only the flailing & swirling of drowsy limbs

striving to gather up themselves again

while another region get 24 months of harmattan

you will not understand

how much ache we bear beyond finality.

April rains arrive with dread, thunder-howls;

silver ribbons intermittently bracing the clouds

not withholding the cataclysm & sweet petrichor,

at sundown we are responsible for the blight.

There is no way to understand this

for instance in the 4th quadrant/

there are many steps to the cradle,

turn upon turn, each inserting into themselves

paths intertwining, paths interlocking, paths intersecting…

death & peace & salvation

walking through themselves with their habits

you may recognize their gait by the declaration

of the white plover, returning from the fanfare of bones.

/In the 3rd quadrant/

The summit is a place of thick, thick-plump

shadows, like the darkened city of elms

we search for asters

to which ones befit these drooping rims

in those nights of vesper bodies walk clumsily

on the broken stairway. With the warm caress

of my palm, I shove your delicate pieces,

sedan of bones, I lift you into

the nightly glow of the tabernacle.

gently, gently with a cool solder

I lay your groin in the heat & weld

the overstretching crease where

the crevice is hollowing into the forge.

/That with able feet you may leap beyond the 3rd /

the long queue protruding the doorway

behind mire & vermilion coal, to which stoic

bodies grow weary with pain.

/Step, step, hop, hop & jump into the 1st/

you arrive in the dark day of famine

under the eucalyptus, despite the drought

the sacred leaves spurt tenderly above your head

to retell of hunger on the sickening patch

in Dzeluokope, these very fingers

have tilled the same furrow

a son is sailing under the evening tide

he’s yelling beneath water, beyond our sightlessness

drumming inconsolably against his belly

telling the route the maize would bend

from the despoilers but we cannot hear.

*If you could fly back once more,

may you follow old fly-paths

may you swoop to watch

the head butting dance of mudskippers

beneath your bridges. it is a sad truth

about the trajectory of flight

that whatever goes up must in time descend.*

©️ Gabriel Awuah Mainoo

Starred excerpts taken from L.S Mensah's poem, To the Volta. (According to sources anthology, 2015.)

Gabriel Awuah Mainoo, special prize winner of Soka Matsubara international Haiku contest, Semifinalist of the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and winner for authorship and creative writing category for 40 under 40 2020 awards is the author of ‘Travellers Gather Dust and Lust’, ‘Chicken Wings at the Altar’, ’60 Aces of Haiku’ and forthcoming ‘Lyrical Textiles’. He serves as project manager for Ghana Writes literary group, creative editor for WGM magazine and, African poetry for Better than Starbucks, USA.

Mainoo has featured in/on The Cicada’s cry; USA, Attempt at exhausting a place in Leicestershire, London, Writers Space Africa, Missouri Baptist University’s Fireflies’ Light, Haiku universe journal, Kalahari review, Ghana Writes journal, Canada's Event Magazine, The Haiku Foundation, Wales Haiku journal, The Mamba, Better than Starbucks, Latin America journal, Malawi’s Nthanda review and elsewhere. He’s been included in Best New African Poets 2018 & 2019 anthology, Bodies & Scars anthology; attempt at exhausting a place in Leicester volume, poetry leaves bound volume, the Cicada’s cry special edition; moon, Quesadilla and other adventures among others. Mainoo is a tennis player in the morning, a student in the afternoon and writer in the evening.

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