Of Heat And Rains

The day the clouds coughed dryly, just after the days of the smoldering heat,
The day it retched brown water on our roofs and our heads and the gele on mother’s head,
The day the smell of the unsalted tears of the clouds kissing the dust reached our noses,
The day father killed the snake that bit Akunna’s left aching leg,
That day, I became a man.

Her smile, slicing through the heart dipped so thoroughly in melted wax,
the twin mounds on her chest, calling so yearningly through the thin fabric like a child to its mother,
and her buttocks, swinging this way and that with waist beads playing on her hips like restless children on a moonlit night,
could drive the maddest of all men straight into sanity.

She called me that day into the bush, as the clouds were gathering their urine in their puffy bladders,
And I heeded, moving like a rat into a delicious trap.
The dry shrubs underneath my legs scratched as I moved past,
But I didn’t care, because I was about to become a man.

Deep in the scanty bushes of Amamife, she stripped, an ebony goddess with the fullness of five.
She cooed and drew me closer and held my staff in her wet hands,
I shuddered, but it wasn’t cold. I muttered insane words. I was mad and was sane and was mad again.
This pleasure did not come from eating ripened udala or roasted corn.
This pleasure did not come from bathing in the cold stream on a hot afternoon. This pleasure did not come from the relief of my bowels hours after a satisfying meal.
This was from the gods. This was the feeling the ancestors must have said existed when you died, yet this was life.

She put me to the ground and my buttocks danced from the pleasure of kissing the warmness of the ground beneath us.
I looked on as she sat and my eyes widened in awe. If I wasn’t holding on to the receding shrubs and grasses, I’d have sworn this was not real.
She moaned and placed my dusty hands on her breasts as she rode with a vigor.
It took some time but lightening struck and I felt the hands of the gods on my body.
It wasn’t mine anymore.
I jolted in pain, in pleasure, in everything that was and wasn’t.
Then I knew.
I had become a man.