Into the Solemn Goodnight | Emmanuel Papa Quansah
POETRY
10/4/20261 min read
everything began to fall apart. home no longer felt like home. the walls had many cracks, surviving on plaster adjustments like your lives
surviving on tears.
& after the sun folded into the clouds, evening settled heavily
between you two. moonlight wandered all over the room
searching for traces of your laughter.
what little it found
were scattered, fractured & unusable.
silence entered your midnight talks & began answering the difficult questions.
then your voice.
not broken, not yet.
just thinning.
when you tried to speak, your breath ran ahead of you, your tongue circled in your mouth searching for what to say
before the words finally tumbled out of your lips
in broken pieces.
at night, you sneaked behind the curtains, wrapped the dark all around yourself
as though it could hold your pain from leaking
into the parlour.
sometimes he watched you,
& felt the shift in the room—
your body draining of colour,
growing lighter day after day, as if your soul
had stepped out for fresh air & forgotten the way back.
Many times, he imagined coming home earlier,
walking beside you through the pale corridors of chemo, carrying the pain your muscles could no longer
hide,
shaving your fallen hair, making you pancakes for dinner,
washing the flakes off your feet,
kissing you on the forehead,
& singing you
into the solemn goodnight.
but his mother, your mother-in-law,
drew him aside
& lowered her voice
into his ear like a bucket into a well:
“her right breast is sore. & the left has already been taken.
this is not ordinary. she is cursed.”
& there he stood, between blood & vow.
& you
quiet, fragile, unfinished, not yet.
when the night gathered at your window,
it came without your wishes.
Emmanuel Papa Quansah is a Ghanaian poet born and raised in Takoradi, Ghana. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kalahari Review, Rigorous, Spillwords Press, Literary Yard, All Poetry, Hummingbird Journal, The Adinkra Project, and elsewhere.
His poems, "Echoes of the Chain" and "Meditation on the Coast," first published in Rigorous, have been reprinted in the maiden edition of the Ghana Poetry Festival Anthology, What They Say Do Not Have An End (July 2025). He was a shortlisted finalist for the 2025 Adinkra Poetry Prize and the New Voices Poetry Contest 2025 and a recipient of the 2025 Sprinng Writers Fellowship (9th Cohort).