The Voice?

Notes

Another complex and suggestive poem by Alamin Mazrui, whose simple language holds great depths of thought and feeling.

We decided to retain 'sharpen' from the first line of Katriina's translation because it kept the ambiguity of sharpen as in the pitch being raised and for its (hidden) suggestion of execution.

The poem appears to be referring to two different kinds of time: one an ancient, ancestral time (in the second verse) that's placed against the menace and destruction of the 'walls of minutes' in the first.