Frederick Kwesi Great Agboletey

AFRICA ON MY MIND

Yesterday, I wept in solitude,

Languishing in secret bitterness

When I saw images of your intense despair,

Your intense sustained suffering

Draped in torrid images on lifeless pages

Come alive-

Those images, vibrant with an intense

Reverberating sustenance of untold deprivations,

Your prolonged excoriation without let

Oh you dark landmass moaning in blazing sun

Your prolonged howling

Have lambasted your impartial audience

Into relapsed state of no reaction-

They simple dried up

Coining an appropriate term: -"fatigue"

Your extremities of deprivations

No longer arouse curiosity;

Red laterite landmass

Of sun whipped blackness

A seeming freak of nature-

Yet nature in you is so resplendent in its splendour

Never tiring in self deprecations

Motley collection of haggardly miserableness

A collapsed core at the centre of the ranges

Lacerated through time,

Noticeable yet lacking-

In some roughly configured essentiality

Shaved linen in a forest of seemingly insurmountable woes

An obstacle course of despairs upon despairs

Seeming aberration of nature in abject mourning

A foppish clown whose best effort

Is unintentionally misunderstood-

Your grinning visage

Amidst structures in disarray,

A bad joke that no longer elicits mirth

Quick on the uptake, you repeat

Belatedly, stale jokes of cruelty-

Your audience your cruel task masters

Your supporting caste fallen out

Into dust of hopelessness

Your reward,

A mere pittance.