Aquah Laluah wrote about her lover’s
rain soaked breasts, about storms within and storms
without, kissing her dusky throat. Thunder’s
note, she called it, which did more than just warm
her flesh. Auntie I never knew, you wrote
about longing and I keep going back
to the source. I, too, crave. Like Qiu Jin’s quote
about music, yours has been the soundtrack
I’ve been dancing to for years. A teacher
at Freetown’s all-girl school [1920]
Auntie, you drank from Frangepani’s proffered
bowl and called it peace: the first faint glimmer
of light. Tɛnki. I love your long, rainy
season, that storm wet craft that you conjured.
][][
Notes.
Gladys May Casely Hayford (1904-1950), who went by the pen name Aquah Laluah, was a schoolteacher at The Girls Vocational School in Sierra Leone. She is credited as the first poet to write in the Krio language, a regional Creole. Tɛnki is the Krio word for thank you. Like Aquah Laluah, Qiu Jin was also a feminist, lesbian poet who taught at an all-girl’s school in Qing-era China, though Qiu Jin was executed after a failed revolutionary uprising. Four of Aquah Laluah’s poems were collected by Countee Cullen in Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets of the 1920s. The quotes of her that I use come from her poem, Rainy Season Love Song, which I share here in its whole:
Out of the tense awed darkness, my Frangepani comes;
Whilst the blades of Heaven flash round her, and the roll of thunder drums
My young heart leaps and dances, with exquisite joy and pain,
As storms within and storms without I meet my love in the rain.
“The rain is in love with you darling; it’s kissing you everywhere,
Rain pattering over your small brown feet, rain in your curly hair;
Rain in the vale that your twin breasts make, as in delicate mounds they rise,
I hope there is rain in your heart, Frangepani, as rain half fills your eyes.”
Into my hands she cometh, and the lightning of my desire
Flashes and leaps about her, more subtle than Heaven’s fire;
“The lightning’s in love with you darling; it is loving you so much,
That its warm electricity in you pulses wherever I may touch.
When I kiss your lips and your eyes, and your hands like twin flowers apart,
I know there is lightning, Frangepani, deep in the depths of your heart.”
The thunder rumbles about us, and I feel its triumphant note
As your warm arms steal around me; and I kiss your dusky throat;
“The thunder’s in love with you darling. It hides its power in your breast.
And I feel it stealing o’er me as I lie in your arms at rest.
I sometimes wonder, beloved, when I drink from life’s proffered bowl,
Whether there’s thunder hidden in the innermost parts of your soul.”
Out of my arms she stealeth; and I am left alone with the night,
Void of all sounds save peace, the first faint glimmer of light.
Into the quiet, hushed stillness my Frangepani goes.
Is there peace within like the peace without? Only the darkness knows.
