Sankofa|Chimeze Umeoka

History emerges from the oblivion

The dark held our voices in the years of blood

In the rotting chains of black silence 

Until our death let out a whisper to the deaf ears 

Of a world saged to be dog-alert,

Listen, reincarnation lives in our bones 

As mystic propellant through the unfathomable tunnel.

On the TV telling history, 

The images of children with ribs like teenage trees

Are contrasted with monkeys hopping through jungles

And no one told about the bluewater boys when the man

Brought ashore to the river in a bed of brass was said to be the discoverer.

Listen, in that same river lived a goddess who had to 

Saunter into the womb of a woman to be reborn

As a mammalian girl when the refinery plundered the water with oil,

I swear, I am not the first angel to bring this prophecy.

The face of the man looking backwards at his journey before death

Was also gazing heavenwards to the new star approaching, 

Have you ever wondered why we return to the world with our skin black? 

With our eyes red from a fire that no longer burns?

This thing you call African curse is the tragic passion

Imprinted as spiritual DNA in our soul,

We will bend the heads of our gods into agreement 

And when the searching eyes of historians gaze back at us

They will not find us sprawled on the earth with diseased bodies 

And festering flies and salt-dry mouths and pleading ribs

Like the documentary from the Mediterranean.

They will find us on the horizontal box of folk culture

Telling stories no longer tainted by stereotypes 

With art not glossed by undersurface segregation,

And even if the children still wear their ribs inside opaque bodies

The metaphors will not whisper them as apesong

They will be written as rivers carrying them 

Towards the aboriginal oceans of their lives.