Akwaba For Sena
i
Brown snow lines the roadways.
The still, grey city whispers
in the sunrise, inching into bloom.
I see your slick wet head
swaddled in a sheet of blood
your mother breathing into the half-light.
Sena! Wailing across my heart!
ii
Lorna stares at the television
not recording the flicker of lights
just willing love to flow slow
in warm streams of her milk
into your quick-suck mouth
locked on like a fish in passion.
iii
Picture this my heart’s solace:
forever, I will watch your eyes
blaze through my dim, lensless blur.
Forever, sweet Sena,
Gift from God Almighty
Akwaba, akwaba, akwaba.
****
Akwaba, sometimes spelled with an additional “a” (Akwaaba), is a Ghanaian word from the Twi dialect meaning “welcome”. It’s the joyous title of a joyous early poem by the multi-talented and far-travelled Ghanaian-born writer Kwame Dawes, greeting a new daughter through a single word steeped in memory.
The poem was originally published in the collection Progeny of Air, which won the Forward prize for best first collection in 1994. It’s included in his New and Selected Poems, 1992-2002, a valuable introduction to the work that established Dawes as an unusually wide-ranging younger poet.
Dawes has confronted some of the most painful events in the history of Africa and the Caribbean: his 1996 collection, Requiem, for example, responds to the barbarism of the Middle Passage and takes the form of impassioned elegies for the “countless dead”. On beginning to read Akwaba, not knowing the meaning of the title, I wasn’t sure of the mood. The scene-setting – brown snow, grey city – and even the initial descriptions of “your slick wet head // swaddled in a sheet of blood” gave me a few pangs, a suggestion of loss and injury before the light dawned, and celebration transformed the images to life and hope. The snow was brown simply because it was thawing; the city, lit by the sunrise, was “inching into bloom”.
The poem resembles a miniature song cycle, each song having a shape of its own, while following an upward curve of emotion. Line seven, standing by itself at the end of the first poem-song, signals intensity when it utters the child’s name. It goes on almost to recreate the sound of new baby’s cry: “Sena! Wailing across my heart!”
In the second poem, the mood is calmer. The scene expands: the mother is now feeding the child in front of a television programme she’s not watching, being absorbed in “willing love to flow slow / in warm streams of her milk”. As the mother nourishes the child with love and milk, the father nourishes her with love and verbal invention. A tenderly humorous metaphorical flourish is complete with sound effects suggesting the noise of a child’s sucking: “your quick-suck mouth / locked on like a fish in passion.” This inner, second section unfolds a spare, fresh, modern “Mother and Child” image. Perhaps you could imagine it had been painted by a surrealist or cubist artist. There is nothing stark. The mother is named. The language is gentle, sensuous and, with “quick-suck mouth”, vividly colloquial.
The speaker is always addressing the child in the poem, and, in the first line of part three, it’s she who is “my heart’s solace” and is given this image of herself to treasure as a “picture”. The walls of the room have been opened out and stretched into time. The time is “Forever” because the poet’s religious faith allows him that concept – eternal life. The focus on vision contrasts the “blaze” of young eyes and the middle-aged “blur”. Physical loss of vision is repaired in this stanza through the power of imagination: even “lensless” eyes can see the “blaze” of the child’s. And it’s implied, I think, that the child is also looking back at the parent who looks at her. Similarly, she is his “heart’s solace” but the love declared is also solace given. The return to welcome in the poem’s last line, with the triple flourish of “Akwaba”, is splendidly simple and effective. It suggests that welcome is registered not only on the singular occasion of birth, but that it is endlessly renewed.
Kwame Dawes continues to build on his achievements. His work covers many genres besides poetry, and is driven by a spirit of creative generosity, shown in his collaborations with visual artists, musicians and other poets. His latest collection is a fresh cycle of poems co-written with the Australian poet John Kinsella, A New Beginning.