Ghanaian writer of poetry, spoken word and personal essays whose writing has appeared in CGWS, Nenta Journal, De Colonial Passage, Global Writers Project and Pure Wata Zine, among others. His work explores the environment, identity and the social impact of broken homes.
He is a 2025 Adinkra Poetry Prize finalist, a 2023 Nadéli Creative Cafe Bootcamp alumnus, a two-time performer on Don’t Let This Become Public, and the author of In My Diary Poetry, a monthly newsletter on Substack.
The beautiful ones are still not born yet. – Ancestors Answer Me
I begin this poem with hunger.
Stripped down to my belly.
I raise cupped hands like a prayer or protest,
begging the sky to speak.
It was your silence that visited me
when the answers finally came.
What I haven’t learnt from the past are your names.
I hold grudges with you like anchors
for all the promises you could not keep.
After what felt like rain in a year of famine,
after 1983 cracked open green again,
you brought us here
only to name a city around our necks—Rawlings’ Chain.
In Accra, there is no sweetness here.
I count my deficiencies on my country’s face,
and it slaps me with new taxes
to fix leakages behind backdoors I have no keys to.
When I stretch my body,
the day shrinks into questions of what price I must pay to keep my name down to my
body.
Nothing stops this body from breaking.
Even this breath feels borrowed
Some blame your decisions —the sugars you traded for mirrors, the white hands you
worshiped like gods.
Others say it was the coup.
That Nkrumah should have stayed.
Yet look at his crucifixion,
in a country that perhaps understood
blood is never thicker than water.
I bring my harvest of tears, too weak to look even at your naked bodies.
Down on my knees, I deny these holy grounds.
I say it out loud:
Ancestors, answer me—why did you touch that one fruit
God asked you not to?
Is obedience not better than sacrifice?
Or were we the sacrifice?
Still—
I dream of a country
that speaks up for her name.
That flaunts her hips higher than Kilimanjaro,
her borders strung with beads made of truth,
her sky stitched in security.
Take me to where the pillars taste like salt,
where justice is not a myth,
And the living does not beg to stay dead.
Fortify me, ancestors.
Fortify us.
Free us—even if with fire.
