Ode to a Silenced Scholar
By Tom Somah — The Sherbro Islander
O, silent scholar,
they fear the mind
that sees too clearly.
They have always feared it.
So they come
with their small authority
and their swollen resentment,
carrying the weapons of the mediocre:
exclusion,
erasure,
the patient starving
of everything that grows too tall
for their comfort.
And you grew tall.
You grew tall
in the way of those
who read the world without blinking,
who enter the guarded room
and name what power
has paid others to leave unnamed:
the ledger kept behind the flag,
the chain renamed the morning
the anthem changed,
the loan that arrived dressed as a gift
and stayed to collect.
Your sentences came like lanterns
through corridors
kept deliberately dark.
In lecture halls,
in books marked by tired hands,
in the margins of strangers,
your voice travelled
where their prohibitions could not follow.
It crossed water and time.
It settled
in the minds of the distant,
unsettled the certain,
and sat beside the lonely thinker
who had begun to believe
he was thinking alone.
They may close the door.
They cannot close
what the door has let through.
Your work now lives
beyond their reach:
in underlined pages,
in questions passed quietly
-from one mind to another,
in the stubborn memory
of those who discovered,
through you,
that truth still had a language.
Brilliance does not ask permission
to endure.
It enters the silence,
plants its lamp there,
and waits.
And when the season turns,
as seasons do,
your voice will not need recovering.
It never left.