The traveler’s memory

The traveler’s memory

Tell me tortoise-like travelers
Where do you hide your heartily eyes
When you crisscross lands and shores
Of spicy tales and wondrous melodies

Do you seat on the riverside
Inhaling the breath of whispering
Rivers and lakes of showery tales
Depicted by the ancient ones

Or do you roam like a lost buck
In green pastures grazing
and swallowing each story
Its flesh and bone as purely offered

When you kneel beside the grinding maize stone
Pounded like maize with the chronicle of the ancestors
Holding dearly each words of their mouth and
Keeping them in the secret corner of your heart

Do you see in their story their pure heart
Untainted, unstained, pure like their water
Coming out of magical rocks and stones
And like snaking pathways in green fields

At the harvest celebration feast
When spirits are undressed
Naked, revealed to your eyes
save and cherish each moment dearly

Tell me hibernator travelers
Looking for sunrays in thatched villages
Where do you hide the wisdom of
these mysterious African roads

In clamorous songs of shepherds
In ritualistic melodies of these young spirits
aspirant to manhood and womanhood within them
echo the voice of their gods and goddesses

do you hold each bead of each story and song
in your palm to make a string of souvenirs
a necklace of undying moment and treasure
then keep it in your heart where no thief can reach

listen each day to the voice of your heart
when it rewinds each footstep of your journeys
at the rendezvous of souls because each bead
of story and song carries the spirit of the ancestors