Read: Adeoye Adetoba | The Broom Above The Lintel

Fade blows across the land
And night draws its curtain.
Sleep invades man and its consciousness
And into the pit of dreams he stumbles.
In quietude he lies as the night sails
Towards the waiting arms of the dawn.

Shielded by the veils of the night;
Serene and obscured,
Men of the dark arise
Beneath a sky absent of the moon,
Upon a land enveloped in stillness.

They thread unlike in the day
When the sun announces steps and directions,
Skirting and floating; toes barely grazing the earth,
Soundless like spirits and evanescent like apparitions,
Into the house they forayed
To leave in the quietness of the conspiring night.

Above the lintel hung the broom
Waiting for the purpose it was made and hung.
Preoccupation with cleanliness
Enthralls the minds of these veiled guests.
Fettered to their new found duty,
Insatiably they swept till the silence of the dawn broke.
The sun, rising with revealing lights,
Announcing the guests and their hidden mission

© Adeoye Adetoba