Mfantsipim School: The inconvenience of wonder

For what is one hundred and fifty years

 but the persistence of an unfinished question?

How many boys must pass through these gates

before we understand that we, too, are passing through time;

that the names we bear are borrowed embers,

 and the futures we imagine, someone else’s prayer?

Perhaps, if habit would relinquish its dominion,

 if the familiar could briefly become strange,

we might behold the magnificent absurdity of our existence

the boy beside us, a universe of unspoken possibilities;

the ground beneath us, consecrated by departed footsteps;

the morning itself, an inheritance we never earned.

And yet, tomorrow, the siren shall summon us again,

and we shall return to our examinations, our ambitions,

our interminable affairs,

too occupied with becoming something to comprehend the wonder

of having become anything at all.

But may there come a moment, somewhere between

 the past and the precipice of tomorrow,

 when we stand beneath this ancient sky and finally

understand:

That mother Kwabotwe is not merely a monument to what has been,

but a living testament to what humanity dares to become.

One hundred and fifty years,

                                          and the hymn still ascends;

still the dream outlives its dreamers,

still the future waits, disguised as a boy

And perhaps this is the most extraordinary thing of all;

not that we have endured the centuries,

 but that, amidst the bewildering splendour of being alive,

we have inherited a story

and are still learning how to endow it with meaning.

Master Isaac Kontan Asare

102nd Head Boy, Mfantsipim School

Class of 2027

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DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.