I am the descendant
Of those who did not make it to the slave ship.
I always wondered.
What they felt as the ships slipped away.
They must have thought
That those people were the lower portion.
Let the men with strange tongues deal with them.
But the sons of the men with strange tongues would be back.
But instead of having sticks of fire.
They would put thunder to those sticks

These men demand our Golden Stool.
We tried to tell them.
Not even our kings are worthy to sit.
Because then they would sit in a grave
But they said they wanted
The stool, the stool.
These men had a throne
But they wanted a stool
We fought over our stool
But we lost.
Although we got to keep the stool
I wonder if we would have won that war
If we held onto the people who were taken away
By those ancestors with strange tongues.
We did not fight then
So we had to fight now


And I hope we can stop fighting always.
Because now our problems are not with men
With strange tongues
But they are with our kindred
With even stranger doctrines.
We did not even get to wake up dead
Because we were not in our beds
Those men survived being taken on ships.
Survived wars over stools
But could not get out of bed because of those countrymen
Who said they would defend against men with strange tongues.