As the air with pomp and pageantry stirs

With our people, a poet our story shares

An African epic of a freedom adventure  

Abounding with optimism and overture

 

A near delirium of delight that fills this poet

Arises not from a boast or a perch on a post

Elated, he is rather heeding the solemn call

That to our ancestors, piety we must accord

 

See, if for nothing, they lent us life, left us art

A wealth of wit and wisdom and myths

Only the poor fool begrudges the dead

So demurs, so shirks a duty held sacred 

 

Our elders say:

The arc of a story must always bend

Towards a moral: Ours begins at the end

Of the beginning of an episode that’s lain

In our much treasured legend and lore

 

Once upon a time,

Imperial conquest corralled diverse peoples,

Stringing strands of traits and scores of tastes

Into a trophy colony; our assorted peoples

Hemmed into one people

In the contrived design,

Our names overlain with names at the whim

Of the conquistador

We know why we name the names

Of places and persons, yet an ancient people,

Now, a curious mix of names:

Heathen, aborigine, indigenous, native, tribe,

Ethnic; today, emerging  

Don’t our elders say:

“Your character reflects the name bestowed upon you?”

 

Enthralled, a race to crave

The allure of the colonial

A tongue to master;

A mellifluous name to assume

Many a tradition,

Proselytizers would forswear as heathen

But to the received shibboleth,

Folks would swear fealty  

Soon though, the riveting irony:

Ranks of the lettered few swelled

To offer a soothing antidote

To the swelling imperial carbuncle

On a diminished people

And a vanished pride

 

At history’s crossroads,

Chance and choice crisscrossed: 

A veteran soldier’s unprepossessing

March for a just recompense,

A lethal gun ready at the trigger:

Adjetey, Odartey, and Sowah

Fallen, as it were,

Not in battle in the rice paddies of Burma

Felled they were

While promenading a Castled beach

Yet reparations to their memory

Extracted neither in gold nor in silver

Nor in cannonading the Castled beach

But in the glory of a freedom fighter’s

Apt moment for outlawry

 

The bond of 1844

A deed of a people’s grave error of surrender

Now a lightning rod to stoke the embers

Of muted discontent into a raging flame

Of unquenchable rebellion;

Martyrs would shed blood

So that within freedom’s fortress,

A people could life’s battles prosecute

Men of valor, unbroken of spirit, would endure

The agony of the Usher Fort

So that at the trodden Old Polo Park,

At the voice of freedom’s herald,

A downtrodden folk could frolic!

Our founding fathers’ foresight;

A perfect vision in hindsight;

A profit of prescience  

For they trawled upriver to the watershed

Of our motherland’s story

Reckoning what that she had been before: 

Ghana, Mali, Songhai Empire;

Beholding what she had become

Amid the twists and turns of time

 

See, deflowered she was

At the onset of a dark,

Orgiastic trade; the hulking remnants

Lay prostrate, pointing heavenward,

Perhaps penitent, on the beachhead

At Osu, Cape Coast, Elmina and beyond

 

Still, she cuddled precious stones

In her ample bosom

Unbowed and radiant,

She bathed in the sun-drenched,

Restorative tidal waters

Of the Atlantic realm

At Elubo, Anomabo and Keta

She was the sacred summit of Afadjato;

The beckoning Akwapim range,

Easing into the bucolic savannah

Of grain and game, of the vast, rustic North;

She was the lush millennial forest of

An interior sodden with the living waters

Of Asuo Afram, Ankobra, Birim,

Otadee Bosomtwe, Densu, Offin, Oti, Pra,

Tano; Black Volta and White Volta;

 

Then and there on the cusp of history;

They saw ahead what she could become:

From that Gold Coast colony:

Servile, an unadorned beauty;

Shorn of wealth and self-worth

To a renascent Ghana: free, unmolested,

Bejeweled, wealthy and worthy;

 

Kwame Nkrumah, Kyeretwie Boakye Danquah,

Ako-Adjei, Obestebi-Lamptey, Akufo-Addo

And Ofori-Atta were the storied Big Six  

Pioneers whose was a bequest of heroic deeds

We, we are a memorial in full bloom;

Befitting their seminal toil!

 

And such as she was,

Such would a young nation brazenly answer

The clarion call to liberation:  

A few million-folk; un-readied

Yet ready for a venture in adventure 

She would parlay statecraft

To breach her scrawny African frontiers

A David in stature yet with an epic temerity,

To confront the bemused Goliaths of an era

A Prometheus at the mid-20^th century,

The virtue of a reconfigured continent

She would proclaim such as

To tackle the Herculean task ahead

To that odyssey would she lend

A pioneering spirit and verve! 

 

She would wage many a noble war

Against dire human privations:

Saplings of education in blissful bloom over

Meadow, hill and vale

To inoculate the folk against the malady of want

To loosen the shackles of ignorance;

Such would be her evocative enterprise

She would tame game, subdue land

To yield harvest for her granaries

A Sphinx of a harbor would realize along

Her Atlantic shorelines

A fleet of her flag-flown vessels would

Venture out to sea and the distant shore

Braving the trade wind and the hurricane

Announcing the spirit of amity

Coaxing commerce from among the comity of nations

She would raise a lake across a gorge,

An nkonson nkonson bo

To lift Akosombo on a grid

A light of hope to cast a radiant glow on

A new dawn of boundless possibilities

And into the arm of the infant nation,

The artist would inject such as to suffuse

The nation with an adrenal rush

And a romantic revue

Ephraim Amu: Extolling our forbear’s

Sacrifice; the ethos of the patriot

Theodosia Okoh: Exuding inventive

Genius in a freedom’s flag that flutters at mast

In an anthem, Philip Gbeho; exhorting

A nation to bravery and dignity

Agya Koo Nimo: Waxing lyrical in nostalgic

Folksongs of an endearingly, enduring troubadour

And our exultant poets –

Efua Sutherland, Kwesi Brew,

Ama Atta-Aidoo and Atukwei Okai:

Soothing our yearning for triumph

With streams of staves

Strewn with sweet melodies

 

Such as so elated,

Such as she would ooze

With a contagion of hope

Such as so inspired,

Such as she would

Set her Elysian sights on new heights

 

Oh Ghana!

Jubilant!

Confident!

Bon vivant! 

Even Bohemian!

 

This Ghana!

Now, an artfully knitted quilt

A rich tapestry

In hue and in habit;

In trait and in taste;

In tenet and in testament

 

This Ghana

Like a long colorful yarn

On the loom and lap

In the ambidextrous hands  

Of the Bonwire kente craftsman!

This Ghana,

Our beloved land of destiny,

But now a benighted sovereign,

Summons our generation to a Pax Africana:

To a new Newtonian age of reason

Such as nurtures nature,

Her teeming treasure-store to unleash

For progress yet to be heralded

For poetry yet to be heard

 

So while our mood is euphoric

May this new journey be begun!

From this glorious 60^th anniversary hour!