We return from winter’s frostbitten heart, marooned in silos to await your advent.
But Spring, still long way off, labours behind doors.
How do you keep out of doors this seasonal ague that afflicts creaky bones and green limbs alike…sweet fever that licks at hearts longing for touch, aching for communion?
True, love’s altar is piled high with flowers; a law whose transgressors are canonized saints! Sovereign,whose colony’s colours attract all stricken souls to sweet slaughter.
They transgress his holiness who shirk the universal rites with cupid on overdrive.
Oh,Saint, we watch you rise from yester ashes today to call wasting world back from dissipation’s brink.
But too far gone is pleasure-mad earth to heed the clarion. See, all rush headlong to the sacrifice: tremor of the senses.
You stand, still,pivot of a flailing earth cultivating ego and vending bile. Yours is time for severance of all ties,when raunchy runs trump sacred oaths.
There, love’s true heart is broken and the cosmos goes off the wheels. And the void yawns!
Season of Judases kissing love’s inebriated hand. Vases of presents send fetor skywards. Beekeepers keep their distance from emporia of spleen and dropsy seizes the false of heart.
Oh, Saint Valentine,your advent drives Virtue’s tempering minions out of town and lust launches a thousand ships on billows of hollow-hearted pilgrims.
Chris Anyokwu, is a Professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Lagos.
