Selected Poems

These are the surviving verses of a writer who published almost a century ago, when a Black woman putting pen to paper in colonial West Africa was itself an act of defiance. Gladys Casely-Hayford wrote between 1926 and 1929, leaving behind a small but piercing body of work that captures a world in transformation: the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone of her childhood, caught between tradition and modernity, colony and homeland. Her poems listen for what was being lost in the rush of colonial "progress," and they speak with a clarity that still resonates. The verses move between the personal and the political, between tender observations of the West African landscape and sharp grief for a culture being dismantled. Casely-Hayford was an educator too, and that commitment to transformation runs through her work like a quiet current. She wrote about women, about memory, about what it means to belong fully to neither the old world nor the new. This is a voice from a moment that will not be forgotten, preserved in lines that feel startlingly alive today.