Today, I Turn Twenty-Four; On Words and Worlds – Two Poems By Ghanaian Writer, Nana Abakah

Today, I Turn Twenty-Four

I feel my own potential seething beneath the cover of cowardly flesh that hovers above my bones. It presses against my chest, screaming to be set free, but my heart stops to bleed before I can carve a path to my skin. I am weary, heavy with greatness, or at least the expectation of it. My soul is a boiling river, evaporating into the sky, into a cloud of voices, and then condensing into nothing. A conflagration of terror seizes upon me when I am beckoned to sing, even if my voice is a thunder song; sonorous, mellifluous, an immaculate dream pressing upon a stained reality. Even if I am a dragon, I am a mouse, a simple church mouse, whose shadow is the figure of a giant that fades at the appearance of light. My fear is my own, as is my greatness, or at least the expectation of it so that it was never really mine to begin. My heart has come to know very well how to bleed in the wrong directions; away from itself but never back into itself. But how does the heart survive if it bleeds for all but never itself, and how does it ever bleed for all if not first for itself? My arteries are clogged with opinion like cholesterol, another internet fry and I am sure to die, but I eat like my life depended on it. I choke. I feel my own potential seething beneath the cover of cowardly flesh that hovers above my bones, and I am weary with greatness.

On Words and Worlds

Words are slow;

They take a while to put together.

But words grow;

Like seeds in the care of an expert farmer

They become idea bearing trees

That feed worlds.

So I like words

Because I too want to feed worlds.