‘No sitting allowed!’ Says the MC at the community centre.
Threat or invitation? Depends how long the drums have been waiting.
The old women arrive first, wrappers tied high around their waists,
already laughing before the speakers wake.
Kpanlogo enters hips-first, all swagger and sideways talk,
the young boys pretending not to watch the girls rolling shoulders.
Then Adowa, with wrists speaking softly;
grandmothers bending to display grief, elegance;
palms turning upward toward Twereduampɔn,
and downward for the ancestors.
My uncle, two beers deep, claims
nobody survives Agbadza without surrendering something:
knees, heartbreak, shame.
‘Nya nansa ŋa,’ he keeps saying.
‘Forget the feet and the dance will disgrace you.’
By midnight, the room had divided itself into regions.
Bamaya arrives shirtless and spinning, northern gbese still clinging to the music.
Takai follows with warrior shoulders, men striking the ground hard enough
to wake buried chiefs.
Beside the plastic chairs, an old man recreates Kete with only his hands now,
arthritis having negotiated peace with the rest of his body.
Royalty is found in his moving fingers. His neck carries authority.
Boboobo enters loudly, seeking communal collision;
sweat is darkening collars, couples are separating and making up.
Then Kple enters to slow, deliberate steps.
Even the talkative grow quiet.
Even the children stop chasing balloons.
The drums are as old as time, older than this country.
Deep into the night, someone puts on Fela.
The atmosphere is charged—just brass and rebellion flooding each room.
Suddenly every dance begins borrowing from every other dance.
Apatampa shoulders inside Kpanlogo. Atsiagbekor enters Agbadza.
Zigi unravels beside Kundum.
No border is surviving the magic in the music.
The floor trembles beneath all that history.
My cousin climbs onto a chair, yelling, ‘Ei, if you die tonight, die dancing!’
Nobody disagrees.
The women are refusing the grave with every movement,
the men are returning slowly to their bodies again.
Even the shy ones eventually surrender.
After Bawa, when dawn dances in,
after Sanga, with the final impossible drum break,
I watch my mother dance Nagla alone, eyes closed,
one hand lifted slightly into the air,
balancing some invisible thing the rest of us have spent years dropping.
Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri (he/him) is a Black poet and prose writer from Ghana. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Transition Magazine, The Malahat Review, Colorado Review, North American Review, Chestnut Review, Tampered Press, Orion Magazine, Decolonial Passage, Berkeley Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is a nominee for the Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and the 2026 Caine Prize. He is the first-place winner of the 2025 African Writers Award (Poetry), the winner of Poetry Archive Now! Wordview 2025, a finalist for the 2025 Adinkra Poetry Prize, and the runner-up for the 2026 Cambridge Poetry Prize.
Instagram: @poetraniel