City of Mystery: Ile-Ife

Vast terrain of magnolia hills

Spilling itself like water

Brilliant bouncing bundles of earth

With patches of balding mien

Ife city, with resounding tongues of

Yoruba ancestry

Quaint and serene milieu

Of mankind’s birth and deities

Dotted with playing children

Like sprouting tendrils in full sway

Fingers dripping with okra

Mouths dressed in peppered stew

Huts and mud houses

With ardor and aged zest

Tell tales of history hidden

And shrouded in distant past

Steeped in myth and mystery

The city is asleep

But the men who walk the transparent night

With spirits, never sleep

Ife, with métiers of terracotta

And cotton cambric too

The farmers with yams and maize

And bucketfuls of camaraderie sticking like glue

Atop these magnolia hills at night

I see reclining stars

And when I rise at early morn

It’s halcyon mist it has

And grey mist tapered on magnolia

With the intrepid glow of yellow sun

Is perhaps that hiatus

Where, in awe my words are gone

So in this little place of hills and mountains

Of playing children and amity

Of stunning beauty and abundant history

I can dwell for all eternity