Leaving the Country (one of my favourite poems)

Leaving the Country
by Bahadur Tejani
(from Poems of Black Africa. ed. Wole Soyinka. [Ibadan: Heinemann, 1975] 190-191)

Then the mind
became a body
immersed
in the water blanket of monsoon
a deep daze of dislocation
from colour
and creed
and country

The vague ache
of memories
that interspersed
space time
like some lost children
in the forest
unworried by strange roads
because everything is unknown
unafraid of twilight
because all
is the long evening
wandering because
the unsure step onward
is the fate
function of limbs.

Yet terrified because
the forest is endless
and outside
through a pale patch
of the green darkness
the sun shines
like a chimera
that deepens the
global gloom.

Only one solace:
there have been
others too,
lingering in that twilight,
who shed
home and country
and at times
colour
who travelled the long way
and also never felt happy.