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5th April, 2024

Friday Poem – ‘Homeland’ by Eric Ngalle Charles

Photograph of a gushing waterfall surrounded by green forests

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Homeland’ by Eric Ngalle Charles from his collection Homelands.

Homeland
We cry for you,
here in our diaspora,
your children wandering barefoot,
are treated like knaves
with no names,
chasing goldstones,
silver slates,
grandfather sold for broken mirrors.
Where are our heroes?
Your tears taste of rape.
We cry for you,
“A child given Sellotape to fix their broken biscuits”.*
Did we not undress on the banks of the river for you?
These are not pictures of us:
bloated belly, kwashiorkor, our wrinkled shinbones gained
sitting by the fire when the rains came.
Mothers of the mountains,
fathers of the seas,
why must your children walk on dried leaves?
Mokele mbembe, river deity, the one who roams Congo Basin,
why are our dreams lost?
Are they waiting for us in the lands beyond the horizons?
Will you open the floodgates after one thousand years?
Mokele mbembe, river deity, you alone know
where our dreams have gone,
why we wander.
*‘A child given Sellotape …’ from Ifor ap Glyn, the National Poet of Wales.
Kwashiorkor: A severe form of malnutrition.