AN OLD MAN REFLECTS - A FREE-VERSE POEM BY KOFI THOMPSON

Sitting all alone having lunch

On a table that serves six

I pause awhile and look through the window opposite

At what should have been the garden

But now grows this year's crop of maize inter-cropped with cassava

And I see the leaves and branches of the papaya, plantain, moringa and corn

All swaying in the wind

Dancing perhaps to some tune of Mother Nature's

Mysterious songs from primordial times perhaps, inaudible to the human ear

Then it strikes me

That soon I shall depart this house that has been my home for nearly a decade and half

And I wonder what will happen to my two papaya and four Moringa trees

The four clumps of clusters of plantain plants and this year's corn crop

And the cassava it is inter-cropped with

It has all come as a great surprise to me and is quiet an upheaval

Thought we were scheduled to leave at the year's end

Life's full of mysteries indeed

Who would have thought that the seemingly harmless, too-clever-by-half Ogyakrom tree-surgeon

Now firmly ensconced in the lucrative God/Jesus business world

Profiteering from selling hope to the gullible and the vulnerable

Would one day, together with his Ogyakrom Hallelujah-God-Jesus master-crowd, set their hearts on this house


That first brought him to this forlorn neighbourhood

To fell that long-missed Indian almond tree the kindly landlady wanted removed

Would ever come to cause me such needless and endless trouble

With unholy shenanigans

What a snake!

Well, one hopes that that nest of vipers

In the Ogyakrom God/Jesus hallelujah-business will finally find peace

Now that the lone agnostic and semi-recluse of Ogyakrom's finally been rid of, for them

And on my part, one hopes that one day God will correct his one big mistake

And ensure that all of humankind's thoughts will be written boldly on every face

And lead to the Ogyakrom God/Jesus business world being rapidly rid of its many vipers for good!

And won't that be really nice payback for that confounded nest of Ogyakrom God/Jesus hallelujah-vipers, I ask?