The Broom Above The Lintel Poem by Adeoye Adetoba

Fade blows across the land
Night draws its curtains
Sleep inebriates man
And into the pits of unconsciousness he stumbles.
Smokescreened by the veil of the night
Men of the dark arise
To a sky devoid of the moon
To the land clothed in black.

Their movements were unlike the day,
Into the house they forced their way
To leave in the quietness
Of the conspiring night.
Above the lintel hung the broom
Waiting to be fetched and used.
Insatiably the sweep; Men of the dark,
Round the house and the compound clean
Till the entire household ascends out of dreamland
When the dawn exposes the deeds of the night.
The sweepers and their dark deeds by their sides
Revealed before the glare of the sun.