The Sorrows Came

The Sorrows Came

When our gardens burned in the banes of treason,

and our essence empaled by American mallets,

the sorrows came in the form of demons

and filled to brim our bloodied ballots.

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The poem was inspired by David Diop’s Poem “Vultures”

Vultures

In those days,
when civilization kicked us in the face
the vultures built in the shadows of their talons
the blood-stained monument of tutelage.


David Diop - (born July 9, 1927, Bordeaux, Fr.—died 1960, Dakar, Senegal), was one of the most talented French West African poets of the 1950s, whose tragic death in an airplane crash cut short a promising career.

Diop’s works in Coups de pilon (1956; “Pounding”), his only surviving collection, are angry poems of protest against European cultural values, enumerating the sufferings of his people first under the slave trade and then under the domination of colonial rule and calling for revolution to lead to a glorious future for Africa.