Notes About The Poem
Feb.17.2024
This or That, Vol.23 Poetry Contest
Sponsor- Edward Ibeh
Building Tension
That night, in a strange place
I was like a fly
Circling a street light
Reeling…Reeling!
I felt so alone
Fear wrenched my throat
Couldn’t predict
When I would be charred to death
I had heard,
In the cover of dark
Everyone was a robber
Or a masked assassin!
Without a roof over my head
I was like a mole
Smoked out of its hole
And exposed to blaring light
Had it been my own town
Where I knew
Every nook and cranny
Like the lines of my palm
I wouldn’t have minded
Being so helplessly stranded
Or left in the night
At a distance….
I saw the faint silhouette of hills
Like dreadful dinosaurs crouching
Also the outlines of buildings
Reminding one of the medieval haunted castles
Stray dogs, mangy
Were raiding the trash bins.
I don’t know why then
I enjoyed their company
I could hear the falling hooves
Of cattle, led to the slaughterhouse,
And the lash of whips falling on them,
Echoing the shrieking of a banshee!
Saw an auto lying upside down
Fallen unwary in a pothole
A line of tanker lorries
Seen halted by the roadside,
Like the bogies of a goods train
And their drivers went home,
To sleep with their mates
Behind the cover, I saw
Two figures leaning;
A man and a woman
Night owls at a mating serenade!
I closed my eyes,
Covering them with my palm
In that unearthly hour
An eerie fear gripped me.
Tension was building inside,
Like a balloon being bloated with air
And how my mind longed
To slither out of that hole
To curl up in the warmth of my home
Far… far away!
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