Christmas season soaks in fervent anticipation
By wishes of children everywhere that hunt parents.
Christmas eve is as happy as a smile!
In the air of the night’s sainted tannery
A goat’s fated dream hates epiphany!
Smoke that ascends in annihilation!
The sun rays from the window pane opened our eyes
That see not when the ephemeral breeze kisses
The spirit fortress inside the grounds of our family yard.
Across the endless land
The cool breeze of the Harmattan
Might have painted the souls of our bodies white.
Saturday went home at one.
Christmas Sunday await with an open mind.
Meanwhile the receding voices
Of chorales ebb into a memory plot
In which time is the metre,
And it was not as forgetful as the sins
Of the village or the towncrier’s sonorous gong,
As amiable and soothing as it could be;
But scores of thudding echoes—
Balm for faint-heated,
Reminded the entire town
To come back on the stroke of dawn.
My memory of the dream I had preceded me.
How else could it be that two able-bodied,
Middle-aged men slaughtered the two Christmas goats
And made goat pepper soup
& ngwo-ngwo
Left in wooden mortars unattended?
The buzz around the house went bee-like,
Scores of men, women, children, with busy fingers
Adjusting the uproar inside their mouths.
Saturday before Christmas bear witness
To memory anointed before birth.
The birth was equally mystified before anointment
Feature image: Work of Photographer, CatBaum “Sahel tree swept by the Harmattan wind” (2008)
