Two Poems by David Agyei-Yeboah

Blood Ties

Grandma washes a piece of my cloth that is stained with blood
by the taps in the lawn.
Her eyes a blooming nightingale,
her lips a focused snarl.
I have fallen from my ascent of the stairs.
A slight graze now leaks with warm blood.
Clad in my nightgown, which tonight is simply a cloth rounding my body.
She has cradled my left leg which bore the brunt of the fall
kissed it
and now the cloth is moistened and rubbed against her palms with Omo.
She recounts how she was never supposed to marry grandpa.
She is Asante, he was Frafra,
And some Asantes saw Frafras as beneath them as a lot of Frafras served menial tasks under them.
So, her family said no.
It was a travesty, a dilution, a union unsacred.
Grandma sprinkles more Omo on the stained section of the cloth.
Yet the blood stained on this cloth is proof that blood ties bore beyond ethnicity.
Blood is red, the heart is red too.
Love is blood, hate is blood too.
I hear the pain in Grandma’s voice,
The subtle restraint, the glaring confusion cracking out her lips, 
The crudeness of the whole familial exchange,
The bloody intensity of it, the stress of it,
that she would have to go through it, 
to wring out love from her lover’s skin.
They thought they just wanted to maintain their pure-blood race,
Grandma coos, in her thick Akan accent that droops with a slight tremor,
But they’ll never realize that when two lovers are reticent in their need of one another, because of norm, in public, 
it never reveals that they’re unwilling to burn down the village, even to keep reticence. 
Grandma’s body lurches, embroidering a determined look as she now begins rubbing the unstained sections of the cloth vigorously, occasionally smiling.
But trust your grandma never to remain reticent. For blood is also transcendence.
She burned the whole village down and still loved in the open, the rubble behind her a memory of resilience.
My eyes rove and brood over Grandma, 
my nakedness against the night,
and say, lips turned to the starless sky: 
Indeed, blood too is memory, 
a consummation,
a christening.

There’s a Reckoning

You need to cast your gaze across bloody stars, wind deeper into a trove of love
away from rumbling doves that perch atop feeble stars. You need to arrest your gaze, 
feed your shuddering to floors that eat quake and quandary.  
Sink into caked clouds and munch on granola bars and brazen pie.
Why not explore the bleak within this time? Is it trying to say something where it last hurt, recalibrate where it last sopped wet with loss? 
Look to the rock from which you were helmed, never to friends that despised your gait
till you bathed in liquid gold, smiled with teeth that crushed Ballantine crystals, then they eyed with longing, restless to suck your anus. 
Look to the power source. Look to God. Maybe He will spit a Promethean fire that will consume the hurt. 
It’s hard to brave a storm when you leak with thick curdles of oiled maudlin. Yet take the first step! With the raging waves meeting the heavens in a sloppy wet kiss;
in the stillness, there’s a reckoning.

David Agyei-Yeboah is a poet, writer and musician from Accra, Ghana. He holds an MA in Communication Studies from the University of Ghana and graduated with first-class honors in English and Theatre Arts for his BA. His work has been published in many print and online journals across Africa, North America, Australia, Europe and Asia. His manuscript, OUR SPIRITS YEARN FOR HOME won the 2023 Kofi Awoonor Literary Prize. It was also nominated for the Totally Free Best of the Bottom Drawer Global Writing Prize from the Black Spring Press Group, UK. David has also won the Webmaster Award in 2025 for being nominated in the Kene Offor-Teambooktu competitions twice; in both fiction and poetry categories. His short story, ‘Kiin Kiin Kiin’ was chosen and included in the Top Ten Stories of All Time list at Literally Stories from a pool of over 3000 stories published over a decade, and his flash fiction, ‘Desi’ was shortlisted for the EU Delegation Prize. Dogs make him smile, always.