She Said She Dreamt

I try incorporate the feeling of nostalgia I get when I think about Ghana within my poems. I like using food to express feelings of emptiness, and the starvation that comes from being far from home.

She said she dreamt you fed her

under the mango tree at her grandmother's house in Kotey,

and with your own five fingers,

hard and black as bark

you chopped moonshaped balls of fufu

to choke her hunger

you slipped pieces of wriwri between her teeth

and used the white of your sleeves 

to dab away the spots of palm nut soup

that appeared on the corners of her mouth

You quenched her distant thirst

with a sip of apeteshi

She said she woke slowly,

lay there heavy with a belly full of want

and the morning light in her eye.

 

Author's Note

It is intentional that I am not defining certain Twi words.

Reviews

[Littleloke]

A strong poem. I enjoy the notion you epitomize how even filling the belly cannot feed every hunger. The fact that it is dream food only increases the pain!