On Writing in Ewe
Script is not enough.
The page is a gourd split open,
its seeds scattered like lost kin.
I gather them, mouth-first,
pronouncing a breath my grandmother
left in the courtyard.
The ink of my mother tongue carries the
names of spirits, it refuses straight lines.
Letters refuse the fence.
Let the eye see plainly:
how word is not tool but ancestor.
How a mark on paper might drum,
might chant, might call thunder into the room.