A POETIC LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT OF GHANA, BY GLADYS MBILLA
Hello, your excellency, Mr president,
This is a letter from your cottage resident
Girl child, the one you promised a lot,
But never ever after have her name again crossed your thought.
Mr. Akung-Fu Addo, don't be offended by this pet name
I have used to address you 'cause its about this game
That we both play together as lovers of the same age,
Though sometimes, some respond to it with so much rage.
Can I take you a little back through memory lane?
When you first met me under THAT BIG IROKO TREE?
Where you first made your initial intent to ME, becoming a solution bane?
Where everything and anything I'd ever want and need would be provided free?
Do you still remember what you whispered into my ear, about HIM from whom you wished to whisk me away?
You told me he had made our village an unfavorable place to any longer stay?
But with you, the trivial many would be treated as equals but not just the family, vital few?
As compared to what HE, as you saw him do, gather under his shed like palm wine to the brew?
You whet my emotions with your tickling peck of words,
Most especially when you touched my nipple with the tip of your sugarcoated sword,
Which run through my whole body with chills of ecstasy,
As though you already built an empire full of the right legacy.
I believed you and decided to, with him, divorce,
Though he relentlessly fought, I took the risk by force.
Leaving him behind like a hungry sheep on a scourged desert,
Emotionally dead - stricken like that of a poor man's dessert.
And now that I fell for your deceitful lies, you can't even lift a stone to kill a scorpion?
Yet, you carry yourself about like a village champion?
Gather your BRANCHES around you, circling like a motorway roundabout?
And I, your lover have been abandoned as though I were a disease which you knew all about?
You used to wear dildos at the meeting of your thighs,
Which I saw, salivated and thought, aah! this could always nightly, take me to the skies.
But now, your sight electrocutes me as though putting my foot into the aquatic habitation of electric eels,
Repulsive, deadly with all the rifts created by these unqualified riders on the wheels.
But now all you do is flying around in a metal balloon?
Like an "ashawo" who hears, sees, and gets close to a business tycoon?
With a mental basket in your hand, flirting around with "yellow skinned" people?
All in the Hell's name of making it easy for the under tree classroom pupil?
Urghh! have you not realized that all those "betweeners" posing as though they were "yabbing" your lover for you,
Are rather creating a vast sense of regret in the minds of your people about you?
And what is this rumour flying about in the wings of words about our village gong beater?
That you always will, would have THEIR heads smashed and downtrodden with your Democratic scooter?
What shame it is when your own offspring would always have to run into the bosom of an alien,
In order to escape the villain of your unaccommodating tactics like a ball being kicked by Michael Essien.
Oh! But then I'd stop here so you could easily glance through,
For I know your mental capability and sight, in recent times has failed you,
Don't forget that the next "push me to climb" market day is almost at the door,
Where all the villagers shall come together to display their hoes for sale, not because they are poor,
But because it is due season to discard those hoes that struck their heels
During the farming season and left so much sores and pain on their heels.
Now after reading, drop the unrepentant vindictiveness, and to this letter reply.
It's me
Your cottage resident
The Phenomenal poet
Gladys Alasid Mbilla.
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