West Africa poetry

Only In Sleep
by Sara Teasdale

Only in sleep I see their faces,
Children I played with when I was a child,
Louise comes back with her brown hair braided,
Annie with ringlets warm and wild.

Only in sleep Time is forgotten —
What may have come to them, who can know?
Yet we played last night as long ago,
And the doll-house stood at the turn of the stair.

The years had not sharpened their smooth round faces,
I met their eyes and found them mild —
Do they, too, dream of me, I wonder,
And for them am I too a child?

More poems from Sara Teasdale

The Stars Are Not The Same All Across The World
by Shiloh Phoenix

My first memories include
tile floors cool beneath my feet, fans
blowing endlessly while the crickets
sang in the dark and the world was quiet.
The stars were always out, there, always
brilliant and near and crowded in the sky, like
there were too many and they couldn’t hardly fit.

I grew up there, in that place of chickens
at dawn and sheep wandering grey in the dusk
and fires blowing ashes and smoke all around
the dust of the land, the dust of the people.
We were a large group of family, brilliant and
crowded into the village, like if one more mother
gave birth to one more baby maybe we would be
too many for the space. But somehow, we learned to
condense ourselves into tangles of bodies and there
was always room for one more. Just one more.

I lived years and years of the sun rising every morning
and water sloshing new into the bucket, dredged up
from the earth with the modern miracle-gift from the
tall yellow-haired men so long ago. Our parents told us
those stories, about how the white men gave us
life from the dust, how their machines brought pure water
right here, to our village, to our home. They did not tell us
about the chains that came before that, about how it was
only right the white men come back with life to give as
payment of their debt, about how their restitution could
never make up for the generations lost. No, our parents
lived small stories in a small world and it was enough
to teach us the ways of our grandfathers.

I heard, though, from older youth, about sleeping
in the slave castles next to the ocean, tasting
the salt of the air and the leftover tears, wearing the
disintegrated chains of other grandfathers and remembering
that if we forget that history we have lost something.

But then I grew up and followed the footsteps of those
slaves to the land of their sorrow, I stepped onto that blood-soil
and tried to make it a new home. Tried to redeem it.
In this new place, the stars are faded in the sky, lost in
the vastness of electricity and development and busy.
Even if we had time to stop and look up, we would see only
the reflection of our own lives staring back at us.

Other TCK childhood poems

Dar es Salaam Delicacies

Story of a Little Girl