Home » Poems » Best » Canny Amah » Best Canny Amah Poems

Best Poems Written by Canny Amah

Below are the all-time best Canny Amah poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Canny Amah Poem

Mother Is Dove

Modest woman moderate woman
Your inner beauty strikes me
Like the tongue of noble eloquence
More than gold even refined gold
Or our purged fulgent silver.

Black woman proud woman
Your pride is not haughty
But a humble pride of eaglets;
Your black eyes are so glittering
As the eyes of our dark rivers
Filled with messages of peace
That banish the broody turmoil
From those panting hearts
Of your foreigned offsprings.

Gentle mother diligent mother
Your kindness kindles the fires
Of my heart –
Your dexterity dresses
The table of our ageless history
And the thought of your being
– Oh kind mother! –
Makes the most delicious menu 
For my heart.

I remember your naked feet
Fast and fair as a pigeon’s limbs
Treading the invisible paths
Almost covered by shrubs
Small shrubs misted by the prime mist.

I remember the wood from the wood 
The water from the water 
And manifold items from jungle alleys 
Borne by your delicate hands
And upon your soft black-haired head.

I remember the constant match 
To markets and to farms
And your bright face smeared with 
The ash dust
Making you more beautiful
Than any woman whose feet
Ever touched the naked earth.

I remember those burdens
Upon your cheerful kin-souls 
And babies strapped to your backs
Babes full of unspoken words
To unborn others in patient wombs
Waiting in an endless turn –
Indeed, mother is dove!
A black dove and a dark huntress
A hunter’s gift from the maker?

Mother is like a weaver-bird
Building a big foot-like nest
Filled with corn and warmth
A bundle of eagle-flight
Mother is dove
And the hunter calls her
The clan’s eternal dove.

Oh, mother loving woman 
Gentle as our black horizon
To you we humbly come
From these far and lonely lands
Hoping to grace our love and beauty
Before that jealous grave
Makes her temporary feast.

Details | Canny Amah Poem

Child-Birth

a trip thru two spheres
what wilful shadows of realities 
with a dead bursting into life

Details | Canny Amah Poem

A Prologue To Phase Iii

Dearest Vicar –
As a poet’s lines: 
It is divinity proper!

Onions figure
In our everlasting divinings:
Her white ashes
Of our burn-fire 
And the dew of dawn’s tears
Still coax the rainbow 
To no avail

Her white ashes
Splashing wet-dusts of dark days:
Cocks crow in vain?

Details | Canny Amah Poem

Maradona

Maradona

He is the footballer of the year
His frosty sport was like a boom
He announced his presence
Under a strain of marshal melody
And with a blast he entered the field;
Lost were the referee & ourselves
In the mist of his bombshells
The game has been a half-time
A smart footballer, he is gone!
It is a game to plunder & share
It is the pillage of our earth
Our earth is at the crossroad.

Details | Canny Amah Poem

On Election Day

Whither those songs of patriotism 
Of which they so freely spoke?
They new-breeds have been fully clad
In old and worn-out costumes
The rickety customs are on the thrive!

Surely we are in a new heaven:
There many things must be amiss,
The old chant-songs of undue death,
Of rigorous riggers and their thugs,
Of vagabonds, vandals and more!

Where are the voters?
Those sands of men whose presence
Have been acknowledged in today’s books?
Voters indeed: they were there!
Isn’t today like former days?

Details | Canny Amah Poem

Ode On the Clan's Iroko Tree

(for: them who are ever there!)

these branches and roots
that cord to the grave ancients
should be free from man’s swords!
both oracle and priest held for days …

I 
Your voice speaks in the silence of the night
To the deep still shady earth
That once held a great zest for our childhood
Here in the once thick wooded land
Where progenitors strewed their rustic huts
Yes! where, sang tho’ unseen those sonorous kin-spirits.

2 
Ah! Happy and keen folks were the ancients, then;
But their sons? what a sad lot, now! even
Demented hearts aching from those drinks of dizzy times
Raw anguish, sorrow, painful hemlocks of death-lines,
The slow songs that tune softly to the mirthful graves
That still hold the ancestors like prisoners in the wild caves.

3 
O! for your unravished wave of primal welcome,
That bade the sonorous weaver come
To make loud greeting of blue azure with song-fleet
O! for such uudecoded song that for the sagging flesh bear ointment
Secret balm from the rhyming unsteady palm leaves of the winds
That flute clearly to ancestors those eternal silent songs.

4 
Known are those festal spirits of your night
From whom many lives readily spring forth:
Mused thru’ the voices of strong mortal compeers –
Priests, priestesses, praise-singers, warriors, dancers!
That with gusto, flounder across the space of time;
O, for those festal moments of flush! o, for the celestial clime!

5 
You are the unseen bridge of the world,
Like Nturukpa, that elder amongst our ferry trees;
Your bark exhumes the bright colours of the past;
And carried thru’ the festal wings of your night
We desire to be mused to the ethereal clime;
Of uncurbed equanimity and euphoria of the divine.

6 
I now know the anguish of these festal spirits
Who take refuge on the water-void banks
Of the topmost branches and leaves;
I now know the noise of their feasts in sacrifices:
Doleful sacrifices in the gods’ swollen foot!
Then adieu! adieu! from the cloyed humans in advent!

7 
O farewell! with all your festal spirits,
Who coaxed to the night of sacrifices, priests,
Priestesses, dancers, praise-singers, warriors of the land;
Adieu! with these cold celebrations and coax-throated songs heard,
Thru’ the voice and echoes of rain’s thunder,
In the day of the panther and his noble twin, the hunter.

Details | Canny Amah Poem

Ama: the Song of the Jungle

Ama you are a father 
Father my father
Whose basket of fishes
Sweetened my mother’s dishes
Whose naked feet danced
The jungle drum you drummed.

I remember
Father I still remember
Those joyous days
When like brooding hens
You employed your hands
To shield the offsprings
Those several bodies
O! the little bodies
That clung to your bare wide chest
Like the eaglets unto their nest!

I remember
The sun-burnt days of the hunted panther
When the full moon-light chimed
The rhythms of jungle drum drummed
Rhyming with the story told
By the white-haired.

Then your roaring march
Along the prime paths of the forest
Then your rustic touch
Touching the weapon-hilt
Making carcasses of beasts
Making fresh clan feasts.

I still remember
The raw feasts of the drummer
Which strewed this universe
Like young Mbari warriors
Taking the spear from several clans
Turning their crowns into tributes!

Ama, you are the drummer
Whose communal tongue echoed
From the hidden chambers of the Niger
The drum of your conquests echoed
Everywhere in the universe
Like the gusto of the Sheik
Confiscating my land from the Sahara
In her eternal desiccation.

You are the royal father 
Whose royal eyes woo the moon
Whose black hairs detain the sun
Like Joshua at Gibeon
Even in the deep valleys of Ajalon
Bringing the heavens to abrupt halts
When their course possesses progress.

O, Ama! you are a noble father
And like the gold-laying eagle my Africa
Your natural pocket flowers gold
Which fills the coffers of the household.

O Ama! you are our race
The clan greets her farmer
The tiller of my earth
The earth of the ancients
The ancients of my blood
The blood of my race.

The clan is still drumming
On the drum that now is a mere echo
Of the eternal rhythm of your drum
Ama, you are still our clan’s song;

O, you are my song
The song my jungle
The jungle of my blood
The blood of my race:

A race
Waiting
Now and ever
In a forlorn clan
Awaiting
A return of the drum?

Details | Canny Amah Poem

Let Me Sing the Weaver's Songs!

I:

let me sing the weaver’s songs!
the songs of old nature -
carrying a retinue of willing dancers
from yon vale to thither hills
amidst these boughs of lively nature
o, boughs, long-held in old tales!
where fairies played games in gardens
of lavish feasts & yet-to-be-heard rhythms.

let me sing the weaver’s songs!
the songs of old nature -
drumming for the entire clime
love songs in the dance-steps 
of naked dancers & rustic elders 
o, love songs that in ancient times
ordained the full & rushing thrills 
of queens, pages & their kings!

let me sing the weaver’s songs!
the songs of old nature -
’twas these same drum-songs
that beckoned on sleeping sages
to wake at the hunter’s voice -
’twas these same drum-songs
that held the lions & death’s paws
& gave beasts in feasts to clans!

let me sing the weaver’s songs!
the songs of old nature -
the drum-songs of the paths
that traced into the deepest roots
of clans - o, my clans! whose elders
languish beside the Niger’s banks;
& let my songs begin in newness
of the old – o, let me sing & dance
singing the weaver’s songs;
singing the songs of old nature –
o, let me sing beside Niger’s banks!

Details | Canny Amah Poem

God-Fatherism: I

the cape of fanfare
vampires raw rampage
for a common slavery.

Details | Canny Amah Poem

Weep Not, Niger

from this forest
where wild life once blossom’d
& from streams 
where young sweety fishes
up-turn’d a thousand fragrance
in some belly-wise shows
gasping
bubbling
drumming to many lips
to a ceremony of delicacies –
& then mother
i was a scukling
babling
crawling
swept by the clan’s lovely drum
& then mother
i was a todler 
graduating from your
ready back-straps
jumping
dancing
suffocating in the dramatic
ecstacies of the native drum -
oh, i greet, mother
& your folks
swept by these new drums
of the bombs
singing of the poverty
in the land -
oh, weep not, niger!