The Second Dispossession Poem by John Agandin

First came the pale ants
Who gazed in wonder upon the land
Stretching to the horizon and beyond,
Man, bird, and beast roamed free
Each belonging to no one but themselves
So they called us headless.
Preposterous!
And with one swift stroke of the mighty pen,
Our Annexation Proclamation was drawn up
With as little ceremony as possible;
'We hereby claim this land for Her Majesty the Queen! '


But our fathers fought and bled and won it back
Then arose the new masters in our time;
Big men, genteel ladies, pot-bellied tycoons,
Chiefs or 'thiefs', we know not,
Multinational looters and robbers,
and the political crooks behind them.
The land is not a cow or a bag of maize,
It must not, no, cannot be sold! Our fathers said,
Now they grieve in their graves, while
Red signs on whiteboards announce
Our final doom;
'Keep off!
Private Property No Trespassing! '


All over the land, the signs rule.
Formidable,
Like sentinels keeping their watch.
From the Black Volta westward to the slave defense wall
and eastward to the crocodile ponds,
Community lands, ancestral lands, farmlands;
Sacred grooves, river banks, marginal lands;
Every village within and without is being preserved
in the stomachs of our leaders.
Only the silent sentinels loudly
Proclaim the evil deed;
'Keep off!
Property of Looters International Ltd
Trespassers will be shot, survivors shot again! '


The second dispossession alas!
A traitorous cancer from within,
more deadly than the first;
Keep off here, Keep off there,
Keep off everywhere,
We cannot find a place
even for our dead to rest!