Arame Sene                                          

FIQWS 10015 HA 25

Lyrical poem

October 7, 2019

A night of autumn

Smells like a night of autumn

A big fire placed in the middle of our houses,

We had no electricity

Ram-dam, Ram-dam, it is the call of the drum.

Children, cousins, uncles, aunts, elders, Running,

whining their waist to the song of female voices

Shaku-Shaku, Bum Bum

The dance can begin.

Euphoria mixed with enthusiasm

Everyone comes in the circle that was formed

Dancing endlessly.

Africa Haiku

I am African

My brown shade and nappy hair Make me African

Mama Africa Is my mother and Father

She is a shelter

She is a huge boat That carries us all

This is Africa

Elegy to Africa

No wonder Africa is called the motherland,

Where humanity was questioned after slavery.

Barbary and chaos were shipped inside of her land

Her children were taken away.

O Africa, your children are now orphans,

Uncle Sam snatched them from you,

O Africa, your children will grow without you

They are now orphans.

Poetic essay

Having to write poems seemed impossible to me for the reason that I thought only poets could do it. When I wrote my first poem with so much ease and inspiration, I was proud and conscious of how much I could do by just trying. My first poem is an elegy to Africa. I chose the theme of Africa because it means a lot to me and because I am at a time of my life where I am Sene3still learning about my race and identity. The audience can be identified as whoever is related to Africa and/ or feel. The elegy to Africa is referring to slavery and how the continent suffered from that event. I used personification because I talked about Africa using the pronoun “she”. I want readers to see Africa as a human in order to emphasize her sadness when her “children”, enslaved people, were taken away from her. The use of allusion helped write my poem. In the sixth line of my stanza, “Uncle Sam snatched them from you”, this line is referring to America, I did not want to directly name the continent, so I used metaphor to make it more interesting and unique. Uncle Sam, also known as Samuel Wilson, was a meat packer who supplied barrels of beef to the United States army during the war of 1812. The barrels were stamped with “U.S.” for the United States, but soldiers began referring to the grub as “Uncle Sam’s. The use of allusion gives us an image and idea of what is being described in the poem. The second poem is a haiku to Africa and is somehow connected to the first one. This haiku talks more about my connection to Africa and how I choose to describe her. I talked about what characteristics make me African and what it represents for me. As the first poem, I used metaphor and personification to shape my haiku. Africa is described as a boat and a mother which means that she is welcoming and spacious enough to welcome anyone’s arms open. That no matter who you are and where you come from, the boat can carry everyone. Last but not least, the third poem is a rhyming poem. It also talks about Africa because I wanted my poems to be connected and to talk specifically about her in different subjects. This poem talks about an anecdote of one of my memory of the motherland. “A night of autumn” is a ballad that is an ABABCDCD rhyme. It talks about the old nights in my village, and how my community and I spent our nights without electricity. I used a metaphor like the other poems to give the reader the opportunity to picture my words. I employed onomatopoeia in this poem as well to make the Sene4reader hear the sound of the drums when the dance was about to begin. The mood and the word choice referred to Africa without being mentioned and it makes it interesting to read and to guess the setting of the event. In both of my poems, I used some rhetorical devices such as pathos that is an appeal to emotion. I applied it to my poems because they are all emotional since they talk about memories and stories and roots. I also used ethos and telos to describe my nights in my village without electricity and to address a subject such as an elegy to Africa. The poetic devices that were used made the poems more significant because they help readers understand more what I am trying to picture. The formality of the writing helps the reader to feel comfortable when reading the poems. The main goal of writing specifically about Africa was to show both her scares and beauty and what makes me a proud rooted African. Also, to make people travel to the setting of the poems which is Africa, all of that with nommo, the power of words