Ode to Ali Farka Toure

He was born on the back of a donkey
At the edge of the world.
As a child the snake hypnotized him
And taught him to sing the songs of spirits.
He held centuries of African memories
In his rice farmer’s hands.

What he accomplished in seven decades
Transcends time:
He caught the echo of enslaved Africans
From across the Atlantic
And turned them into a gift,
Reuniting a broken family.

His music is not his music.
It is the spirit of the Niger River,
The soul of the Sahel
And the shadow of the Sahara;
It is a djinn that sings in a dozen languages
As it asks you to lay down in the grass,
To let the serpent look into your eyes.

He was a Grammy-winning rice farmer
Who toured the world
Only to be content to be at home
Tending his crops
Upriver from Timbuktu.

What he did was for all people,
For all people.
When will we in the West understand
This basic guiding principle?

*a djinn is a spirit in West Africa. they inhabit all forces of nature: the wind, rivers, trees, rocks, etc. they can be either good or bad and they are thought to be responsible for the order of nature and human relations.