This is one of the best poem I have ever seen
the Anvil and the Hammer
Caught between the anvil and the hammer
In the forging house of a new life,
Transforming the pangs that delivered me
Into the joy of new songs
The trapping of the past,tender and tenuous
Woven with fiber of sisal and
Washed in the blood of the goat in the fetish hut
Are laced with the flimsy glories of paved streets
The jargon of a new dielectric comes with the
Charisma of the perpetual search on the outlaw's hill.
Sew the old days for us, our fathers,
That we can wear them under our new garment,
After we have washed ourselves in
The whirlpool of the many rivers everyday
We hear their songs and rumors everyday
Determined to ignore these we use snatches
From their tunes
Make ourselves new flags and anthems
While we lift high the banner of the land
And listen to the reverberation of our songs
In the splash and moan of the sea.
As one of the modern west Africa's best known writers, the Ghanaian poet Kofi Aw oo nor integrated ancient African forms of expression with technique of modern poetry.
The Anvil and the hammer tries to explain to us the condition of an educated African as being caught between the anvil and the hammer, where he is being reformed and reshaped like a metal Ina blacksmiths hand.
He refers to the institutions used in this reformatuon as the forging house. Here the persona tells us that the process of reshaping is a painful one, comparable to lab our pangs through which the African is reborn.
At rebirth, there I left in the new African very little of his original African heritage which he is ever ready to sacrifice on the alter of the new culture and to bury it...