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?
Copyright © Canny Amah | Year Posted 2009
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