Letter To Ellen Johnson - Sirleaf

I rather watch a kestrel to see Her swoop and swirl The skies invisible maze To feed the inhabitants of her nest Her milk of gratitude Morning begins with a bright darkness And the beckoning beaks for food There is a wind ruffled mood Yawing the feathers of the breast Dawn is a ransom for the truth Her flight negotiates The billowing whirlwind Of dust Settled in the bowl of expectation It is the African way. Courage cannot wear shackles When the protest comes This transition Have shaken superstructures Not roots, but leaves Any grafted branch can bear We did not invent this way This democracy Churning chaos out of selfishness This way of bridging men's hope This inclusion that is exclusive This decomposition of old bargaining Of parables under ancient trees Strange shifts happen When we disrobe our cloth Baring ourselves of familiar primitives Was not the old ways good enough Why did we not transform it While the time was transforming us Into spectacles Since we did not want to be invisible still Will we transform what we Have borrowed Into a resemblance of our sense Of equality, belonging and value? The base fumbles into sectors Carved by streets intersecting villages Divided by self interests More than any division of our origin We who came from Jamaica Barbadoes, Trinidad And Guyana Leaving Elmina, Shama, and Sekondi behind Cattled in the coral that was not pearl Permitted by a sympathy of the Unites states Came here forming a new state Out of forgotten memories Of lost addresses and broken grief Of kinship disillusionment Called this Liberia Clothing the construction of autonomy With the identity of freedom. Is it surprising then this tension This fractious existence In a dark forest of genocide That each sit not well with self as stranger For this group have no social memory Beyond the coming of the ships Until a common bond is forged From the sorrow of years of fire To form a new collective identity Nothing speaks to the deep insecurity Where there is a need for belonging Like the suckle of the milking breast Soft on the flesh of the tongue With kindness Telling us our faults Teaching us to be brothers again Telling us how to feel the humanity In our forgotten hearts Straining to build out of the pain.