Haiku for Maya Angelou
twilight…
a meteor leads
the slave-child home
night requiem
in Winston-Salem
the caged bird sings
in her dark
i picture the shackled thrush
fly into daybreak
soaking moon
how tender the widow
drenches the weather
moonlight jazz
the contrapuntal of a lark
deepening my blackness
Haiku for Maya Angelou
twilight…
a meteor leads the slave-child home
night requiem
in Winston-Salem
the caged bird sings
in her dark
i picture the shackled thrush
fly into daybreak
soaking moon
how tender the widow
drenches the weather
moonlight jazz
the contrapuntal of a lark
deepening my blackness
Gabriel Awuah Mainoo
Gabriel Awuah Mainoo is a Ghanaian creative practitioner and an author of poetry books. His awards include the 2022 Singapore Poetry Prize, 2021 Africa Haiku Prize, 2021 LFP/RML/Library of Africa and the African Diaspora Chapbook Prize, among others. Mainoo is a recipient of the 2022 West African Writers Residency, the 2023 Transatlantic Relatives Residency, and a 2024 International Writers Workshop writer-in-residence at Hong Kong Baptist University. His work has been published in The London Reader, FIYAH, Prairie Fire, EVENT, and The Michigan Quarterly Review, among others.
