POETRY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: "THE GRAIN TRIBUTE" BY KABEDOOPONG

Kabedoopong Piddo Ddibe’st is an internationally acclaimed published multi-talented Ugandan poet, visual and aural artist, editor, amateur actor, literary and cultural activist, featured in numerous both national and international online and print magazines, newspapers, and anthologies; born in Kitgum, Northern Uganda.

The poem goes this:

Here are your sweet beers great ones;

Do not bleat like hungry goats now,

Be quiet and drink your drinks!

Here are your delicious foods;

Steaming blood of bleeding lambs,

And raw blood of crowing cocks;

First fruits of the fertile fields.

Here are your destitute sons and daughters,

We have come to your great clan-oracle

To seek your flaming hidden eyes;

We have come with our shaven heads,

And wearing torn black mourning clothes,

We are at grief the land you left us is no more!

They have grabbed and gazetted the forest,

(They say animals are better than your sons)

The whole big green forest is in flame,

Where you once hunted wild animals barehandedly;

They have found crude oil in your hills,

And your hills are now their hills!

Like stranded monkeys that have seen a pursuing rain

Upon this land  your sons squat like baboons,

They forcefully requested them to evacuate

Like waste discharged from Islamic stomachs!

(Trespassers shot; survivors shot again)

Your land that is our land is now their land,

Like steaming malrwa beer,

They  draw the crude oil with steel straws

And cook it in a big dark cloud coughing house

And the long hollow metallic snakes of straws

Pass under ground to draw the fat of the land

(Now your sons are mere laughing dry bones)

Their new paths have knocked down your ancestral trees

And the small huts we erected  for you

Their prayer warriors have burnt them down

And built huts for the husbands of their grandmothers

The cold bubbling rivers of the land

Which demarcated our land and our neighbor's land

From the North to the South; East and West

Have been diverted and the waters drunk up

And there they empty the stomach contents

Of the groaning hungy coughing steel huts

We are sick at our very hearts

And homes are profoundly unbearable

The war is within our very huts

It is now we on us, bleeding nightly

Do not abandon us your black sons in your wrath

Do not whip us with wrath and crocodile tails

(Whip us with love and kindness)

In your wrath, who can stand before you?

Your eyes that are lightenings

And your voice that are thunderstorms

In your wrath, who can remain alive?

We know we have uprooted the pumpkin

From our abandoned old Homesteads

And now we have roamed the world

And homesickly seek for homecoming;

We know you see over us when we sleep

When we sleep in mournful numbers,

We know in silence you hear us wail

And you know it is twenty-four seven night in this land,

The darkness has covered all our doors,

And we squat under bush waiting for sunrise,

Your great sons are chicken disappearing like exorcised demons...

Oh, Great Spirit of Harambee,

And Spirits of Lagoro and Abayo;

Let Lapono Rock be not angry

Though we know you're hungry;

Here is your sweetest drinks

Our senior wives have fermented it for you,

The sweetest fermented kwete you once enjoyed;

Drink and forget the sins of your sons

The travelers who shall never return home alive,

Death will bring them back alive;

We forget you like chicken forget stepping on bowls of green

That they cannot eat, and walk away...

You Ubuntu, Great Spirit of black Africa

Here are your beautiful bubbling beers

Drink and forget our wrong taken paths

(The paths of the new lead to the graves)

Intercede for us before the Almighty Spirit,

The High Divine Clean Spirit of the Skyland,

We who are unworthy to look at him in the eye;

Intercede for your prodigal sons and daughters,

We who are dirty and cannot sit before his clean face,

Great spirits of our ancestors,

May you guide our restless feet

Into the ancient paths of the old,

The new paths are full of dung

And full of petals of barrels;

When your sons step on the dung,

It cannot go like a chameleon's waste.

And you Great Spirit of Ujamaa,

(Only fools forget your communal  face)

May you strangle the serpent Spirit of Carl Peters

Hovering over the land for a return;

Let Bismarck forget his mother's name;

May you whip the Spirit of Putin between the legs

And send it running back without looking behind;

That evil spirit tiptoeing into your new compound!

May you lose the voyage ship

Of Vasco Da Gama in the wilderness of the  Sea

And let Stanley drink the soup of his own head.

© KABEDOOPONG PIDDO DSIBE'ST

The poet persona speaks about colonial oppression and the stealing of men to travel outside the black country into slavery. The speaker also laments how the mineral resources of the oppressed land are being stolen by another superior nation under the pretense of modernization.