and in nineteenth ninety-six,
everything had killed a black woman;
the ruined teeth of light in schwarz weiss is a ladder made of grief.
36 and in flight. o little birdie wing-quiet.
was your sky not the blue head of a snake?
Is gravity not venom?
o falling bird o fallen bird;
there is a bruise in the way you move.
what was so sweet about your ink wounds?
you a floor mural of black smoke.
I search for you in broken lip of Kreuzberg
because silence is no simple answer.
chale, listen, no be say the sky get sense pass God,
It-be say, if God get nose like he no go survival the smoke in wɔnna voices.
My country has not slept since borders.
a borderline is where we stabbed God in the ribs & nailed him to our flag.
Money be language wey no dey breakdown with repetition—
wey survive love & paper. Wey survive poetry.
“Sika yɛ mogya” “Sika yɛ mogya”
& blood sits in the air with a rifle in its throat, & we eat its red hiccups.
God e wallet be crow costume
wey e coins be holes guns make.
Sarpong Osei Asamoah is a bilingual Ghanaian poet who lives in Accra, Ghana. His work has featured in Tampered Press Magazine, Protean, Agbowo Magazine, Lolwe, Olongo Africa Magazine, Bacopa Literary Review, Journal of the Writers Project of Ghana, (Twi poems) at WriteGhana.com, 20.35: Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and elsewhere. He is a founding member of and has served as poetry editor at the Contemporary Ghanaian Writers Series (CGWS). He has also been an intern at the Library Of Africa and The African Diaspora (LOATAD) and is an editorial intern at Tampered Press.
