The new African poetry Book

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
	Incantations of the Sea: Moando Coast	11
	Newscast	13
	Obbligato from Public Gallery	14
	Old Wharf Canto	15
	Dialogue	16
	Symphony from the Balcony	17
	Of Promises and Prophecy	19
	Four Ways of Dying	22
	Manifesto on Ars Poetica	24
	A Love Poem for My Country	26
	The Singing Drum	27
	Everything to Declare	28
	Double Song	29
	These Too Are Our Elders	30
	Visiting Zomba Plateau	31
	Making Our Clowns Martyrs	32
	The Cheerful Girls at Smiller's Bar, 1971	33
	On Being Asked to Write a Poem for 1979	34
	I Was Sent For	35
	Walking the Plateau	36
	Pain	37
	Reborn	38
	Summer Fires of Mulanje Mountain	39
	An Artist and a Wailing Mother	41
	Corruption	42
	An Agony ... A Resurrection	43
	Nightmare I	47
	Nightmare III	49
	The Scaffold	50
	Tomorrow	52
	The City a Wrecked Ship	52
	Abortion	53
	Confessions	54
	I Usually Look Around Me	54
	Abode of Arrival	55
	State of Butterfly	56
	Arabesque	57
	December 31	57
	Wall of Dreams (2)	59
	Belonging to a New Family	61
	Here I Am Once More ...	63
	Ode of Signs	65
	Female	69
	Quatrains for Joy	71
	The Pen	72
	On the Tattered Edges ...	73
	My Woman's Transparence	74
	The Africa of the Statue	75
	The Vultures Grow Impatient	76
	Homecoming	79
	Guerilla Fighter	81
	Poem of Return	82
	From the Outside	83
	Promise!	84
	There's an Unknown River in Soweto	85
	I Saw as a Child	86
	I Have Tried Hard	87
	I Waited for You Last Night	88
	Sometimes When It Rains	89
	Observations	91
	The Women Sing ...	92
	The Know	93
	Welcome to the New Consciousness	95
	Wet Pain ... Tread with Care	98
	Ofay-Watcher Looks Back	99
	City Johannesburg	101
	Alexandria	102
	This Old Woman	104
	The Curfew Breakers	105
	The Change	107
	Red Hills of Home	108
	You Will Forget	110
	Desert Crossing	112
	The Old Man Inside Me	112
	When Love's Perished	113
	The Cemetery in the Mind	114
	Neither Innocence Nor Experience	114
	This Morning	115
	Arrivants	117
	Kisimiso	119
	Let It Be	121
	Mr. Bezuidenhout's Dogs	122
	By Forty-Sixth	125
	Leaking Roof	127
	Another Moment	129
	Return to the Homeland	131
	Along the Banks of the Charles	132
	The Martyred Tamarind	133
	The Island and Europe	135
	The Emigrant's Son	136
	Three Poems	137
	The Elders Are Gods	139
	No Argument Tonight	140
	Mr. Agama	141
	Television as God	143
	I Want to Go to Keta	145
	They're Tearing Up the Old Graveyard	147
	They Hunt the Night	148
	Elegy for the Revolution	150
	Tsitsa	151
	Murmuring	151
	Our Birth-Cord	152
	Exiles	154
	Illicit Passion	155
	Mawu of the Waters	155
	Messages	156
	A Note to My Liberal Feminist Sister (1)	159
	Steps	160
	I Am the Freshly Dead Husband	161
	King Tut in America	163
	Home News	165
	A Stone at the Tip of the Tongue	167
	Cloud Rains	168
	The Way	169
	The Spring's Last Drop	170
	Harvest of War	172
	May Ours Not Be	174
	When the Monuments ...	175
	The Dialogue	176
	Bitter	177
	Oya Now	178
	4th Witness - The Petty Thieves	179
	I Wan Bi President	180
	Do Not Stop Me!	185
	Poem	187
	Asphalt	188
	Prologue ...	191
	The New Brooms	192
	Song	193
	Where Everybody Is King	194
	The Fate of Vultures	196
	A Verdict of Stone	197
	The Daydream of Ants	198
	Where the Nightmare Begins	200
	Release	201
	Paris Latin Quarter	202
	She Thinks in Song	204
	Longing	206
	I Sing of Change	207
	Who Says That Drought Was Here	208
	XXII	210
	XIV	210
	The Word Is an Egg	212
	Dyeing	213
	Letter to a Roving Poet	215
	Cloak of Dawn	216
	Analysis	219
	Peasants	221
	Poet Among Those Who Are Also Poets	222
	Childhood	223
	Dead Eyes	224
	Beloved	225
	Lungi Crossing	226
	When You Have Emptied Our Calabashes	227
	Notes
	Index of Authors
	About the Book