Moonlight Story Poem by Chima Ononogbu

A dull evening in my hilly hearted village,
a time when squirrels dance up the lower heavens;
Children faces ballooned in boisterous borderless smiles,
looking forward to the entrancing moonlight tales.

This time, the harmattan made a dive with squeaky breezy cold
that made our lungs quack like a choking duck
and our sleepy little noses ran like a red ferret.
All that the sky had spewed into the unwilling atmosphere with bated breath awaited the moonlight story soon to unfurl like cocoyam leaves.

As the sun began to fade and its rays silently retreating
into its abode in clandestine sky,
and darkness faintly in the horizon roaring
to swoop down on our helpless village with a blinding cloud,
we strode down the shining meadow in cheerful arrays.

We sat down on the low headed meadow made of smiling greens
under the light of the watching moon.
Enraptured in awe of the incandescent words spilling out of the story teller's lapping lips,
lifted from the cave of time the great exploits of our ancestors.

The exploits into our insatiable ears rhythmically wafted
cocooning our minds in blanket of caressing courage;
then our eyes glowed like stars riding the wave of tickling ocean.
As the thin air thickened, around us hovered sweeps of light circular as halo
that transported us between the transcendence and the ordinary.

The moonlight tales brought down the gods by the eyes of the sky,
as lamplights lit the way through the twists and turns of time,
as a ferry ferried us into the living mind of the presently past,
yet a rendezvous where the past and the present intertwine in a holistic union.