Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

We Departed Our Homelands and We Came . . .
– Grebo Saying

We departed our homelands and we came,
so the Grebo say, we came with our hands
and we came with our machetes

so we too, could carve up the new land.

When we left home, we crossed streams
and we climbed up hills; we set out through
wet brushes, and the rivers parted
so we could cross.

We know that if the leopard should leap,
it is because it sees an antelope passing.

We came, not so we could sit and watch
a wrestling match, not so we could watch
the land on which our feet walk,
rise beyond our reach.

We journeyed from our homelands,
and we came, so, let it be known that we left
our homelands, and we came.

When we arrived, we dug up the earth,
and in this new earth, we laid down
our umbilical cords, forever.

So let it be known among the people– we left
all the beauty of our homelands

not so we would sit out on The Mat to wail.

Biography When the Wanderers Come Home

This is where we were born
in these corrugated rugged places,
where boys chasing girls chasing
boys chasing other girls chasing bellies
chasing babies chasing other babies
chasing poverty, chased death.
Of potholed streets and bars and sex
and other girls getting drowned
forever and ever in loveless love.
And then the fires of our lives
lit other fires of other lives
with lust and then
there was no longer us.
So then the war came with its bullets
chasing people chasing the bombs,
and ghost towns sprang up
with carcasses of the dying
and the dead. And like mushrooms,
the dead rose up to claim the land
and we were no more.
But the fires still burned in the wombs
and in the eyes of the city streets
below which the dead lovers and
love lie. And there was life again
out of so much pain,
and life took on its own life again
and the girls returned on the backs
of surreal horses in search
of that old fire. But these were no longer
the same girls or boys or men or women.
But this is where we grew up on these
sidewalk streets, in these rugged places.
This is where the streets come in.
This is where we belong.
This is where life begins.

“Biography When the Wanderers Come Home” was previously published in The Literary Review, Winter 2009 Issue

My Mother Came to Visit Me Last Night

In the fading dusk, the skies, bleeding orange-red,
and Mama standing there, in her lappa and bubba
suit, of pure wax. The lappa, so neatly wrapped

about her, she could have been alive still.
But the bubba’s sleeves, flying in the ocean breeze,
its butterfly wings, as if in preparation for taking off

like a plane, as if for the afterlife. As if to say,
“I am not here to stay, my daughter, I am not here
to stay in these your spoiled spaces.”

Her baby-lappa, wrapped so neatly about her waist,
taking over the mother-lappa, and Mama looked
like someone on a long journey by foot.

In my arms, I carried a small child even as I walked
up the path to meet my mother at the front of what
was supposed to be my home. The house

with its wide sandy front yard near the beach
somewhere in Monrovia’s Sinkor. And in that place,  a
few people stood around as if this were truly

Monrovia again, as if this were again the life my mother
knew before her passing. Mama held out her arms
to take the child from me even though I could not

see her face even as I looked at her face. I could not
see the child’s face or tell if it was a girl or a boy,
if it was my child or another woman’s.

The wiggling child, wary, of a Grandma, coming
out of thin air. This woman was real, I told myself.
“My Mama,” I cried, imagining Mama’s sparkling,

dark eyes, her small gap teeth, her arms, swinging,
the way my mother used to move, telling one story
or the other. Her brown skin, aging, her way

of laughing as if each laugh were a broken piece of log
upon air bubbles, a long hard laugh, broken into small,
chunky pieces, blocks of laughter- as if her life

depended on laughter and humor, song and dance.
She was my mother, for sure, poking fun at everyone
as they stared in disbelief  at Mama in my dream world.

I stood there, watching my mother, who could make
a full room laugh until tears strained down the corners
of everybody’s eyes. Mama stood in the doorway,

in my open, dream doorway, looking on the inside.
She would not come with me inside the house or give
back the child to me. They say, the dead may not

come inside the house in a dream. In a dream, the dead
cannot give themselves up to the living. In a dream,
one cannot hold their dead mother’s hand or look into

her face or give a handshake or kola nuts in welcome.
The dead must visit with the living only from the outside.

Copyright © Patricia Jabbeh Wesley