The Snowflakes Sail Gently Down 
The snowflakes sail gently
down from the misty eye of the sky
and fall lightly, lightly on the
winter-weary elms. And the branches,
winter-striped and nude, slowly
with the weight of the weightless snow
bow like grief-stricken mourners
as white funeral cloth is slowly
unrolled over deathless earth.
And dead sleep stealthily from the
heater rose and closed my eyes with
the touch of silk cotton of water falling.
Then I dreamed a dream
in my dead sleep. But I dreamed
not of earth dying and elms a vigil
keeping. I dreamed of birds, black
birds flying in my inside, nesting
and hatching on oil palms bearing suns
for fruits and with roots denting the
uprooter’s spades. And I dreamed the
uprooters tired and limp, leaning on my roots –
their abandoned roots –
and the oil palms gave them each a sun.
But on their palms
they balanced the blinding orbs
and frowned with schisms on their
brows – for the suns reached not
the brightness of gold!
Then I awoke. I awoke
to the silently falling snow
and bent-backed elms bowing and
swaying to the winter wind like
white-robed Moslems salaaming at evening
prayer, and the earth lying inscrutable
like the face of a god in a shrine.
Gabriel Okara
When anthologist Victor Ramraj edited Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English published by Broadview Press in Canada he described its “intention” as “both to provide an alternative text to anthologies of traditional and established writings” and “to complement” the many other anthologies of world writing that were already well known. He exhibited such a wide range of national literatures and styles that this anthology gives “sociological or anthropological insights” into different peoples and cultures, demonstrating quite a “literature without borders”.
We have already shown the example of Edwin Thumboo and how/why he is seen as the pioneer – the creator of native Singaporean literature. The remarkable poem “Ulysses at the Merlion” that looks on the surface very much like an echo of Greek mythology, Homer and other modern and Victorian poets, is actually a deeper creation of native verse. This tension between the international – the wide world of literature – the English poetry, and the Singaporean is demonstrated in other literatures and writers represented in the anthology.
Outstanding among them is Nigerian poet, novelist and playwright Gabriel Okara. There is significant similarity between the work and the place of Okara and that of Thumboo. Okara did for African literature what Thumboo did for Singaporean. Okara is regarded as the unsung, unfabled father/founder of modern African literature in English. From translations of Ijaw traditional poetry into English in the 1940s, he progressed to publishing his own verse in English carrying the West African Ibo culture with it.