The Fires Eat the Land at Home (After Kofi Awoonor)

At home the fires are in the fields

Licking up twigs, herbs and every blade of grass

Leaving a bleak blackness everywhere

The fires eat the land at home

 

They came one day in the heat of noon while men rested

Racing through the cornfields

And licking through the rice farms,

The sorghum, soya, and late millet

The fires eat the land at home

 

How sad a thing to hear the wailing of women

And the mournful sighs of grown men,

Calling on the gods to save them

From this monster of their own making

 

Analim stands in the middle of his field

With his two sons, sweating from the heat

His hands on his head, in despair

Frantic efforts with neem branches and buckets of water

Could not save their burnt crop

The women are weeping mournfully,

If only tears could quench the blazing fires

But alas, the ancestors and the gods are silent 

And the flames of hell have broken out

Eating up the very soil

Sending thick clouds of dark, dark smoke

Into a clear sky 

Whilst an angry sun fumes

Sending down fiery darts of his own

And the flames leap in ecstasy

Cheered on by persistent Harmattan blasts

 

Alhassan has lost his sorghum to the fire,

Mma Asana has lost her soya to the flames,

All have turned into a pile of ash! 

Lives and livelihoods turned into ash

Far away, a man saunters along a heedless farm track

The tobacco stub he flicked into the bush, flares

Ayaala and a brood of impetuous youth, 

match home in glee,

Recounting their hunting exploits and their kill:

One hare, two squirrels, three snakes, 

A grass cutter, and two rats.

The bushes they set ablaze did serve them well

Yet its remnants are the monster to their neighbours

A reckless craze for ‘bush meat'

And the fires continue to eat up the land at home.

Right in front of a District Assembly!