Slaves Who Painted Dreams Poem by Frank Bana

The underfed lions in the Emperor’s palace
Pace behind iron gates on the Hill of Spring -
The pachyderms die unwatered on the banks of the Zaire
River Zoo as generations of war machines parade -

The wildebeest corpses piled and rotting on the wires
Strung up to guarantee well meat for Smithfield market -
Enclosed, mortgaged, incorporated, the hills and streams
Of the Namib, in the power of men who would own mountains

While in survival style, the market boys
Who line the treacherous tarmac heading to Mpika
Hold up puppy-dogs and rabbits by the ears
As the WaBenzi roll their big wheels by.

At rest, I see in outline, the shade-net nurseries
Of saplings watered in their plastic stands
Awaiting the Sahelian rains to soften the soil
In the perforated hillsides of Santiago de Praia

And “green diamonds” from the Gaborone dam, sold side by side
On Saturdays, with batiks from the Roll-the-Blanket museum
And the sandals from Pilane that will wear for years -
Those old tough tanned cow hides.

Awaking in the year two thousand, seeing again:
Old children in displacement camps on the Limpopo
Freed from indentured rebel service, faces distended,
Eyes not alive. And more than this. The rows of skulls
In a church of memory in Rwanda.
And I remember reading of
A father in Bosnia nailed to his front door. A man
Dragged behind a Texas pickup until he too was dead.
And a kid from Senegal, reaching for his identity,
Blasted with bullets in a Bronx brownstone
Until he too was dead.

When I was a child: A Turkish “radical”
Was burned to death with acid on a hillside. A newspaper photo.
Accusing image, the open mouth, without an accompanying word.
A poet-singer whose song I did not know, not then,
His fingers were broken carefully, before he was shot
In the Santiago de Chile stadium. I lost count of it all
Somewhere in the 8th decade of the twentieth century.

Does someone remember every name, and every crime?
Is every insult registered somewhere, an injury?
Are we learning to own the count ourselves,
Lest we be slain once more with numbered forearms?
Will we renounce before it starts again, tomorrow?
It’s about time - about how we choose to run this race,
Which has kept us barely human.

In the slave fort of Elmina you can tour the basements
Where the captured were held, and women were raped
At Portuguese (or any colonial) pleasure; the slits in the walls
Where humans stepped out on the causeway to the ships.
You can hear the flowing, urgent words of the Ghanaian guide
And the pain in the throats of visitors from Africa-America

In 1996 in Elmina, I stepped away to one side,
Considering this diminished animal, raised out of Africa,
Who painted dreams and invented such words:
“Suffering”, “Ordinary”, “Loving”, “Cruel” -
Remembering so many other killing grounds.

I was praying, perhaps; calling to the ancient sky:
“Renaissance, arrive to claim your time.
Speak for your own name.
Claim it now”.