Okolo Chinua | A Butterfly of Rainbows

EAVES AND A BUTTERFLY OF RAINBOWS

“The eyes reflect…
The eyes are the window to the soul…”

For this to begin you need silence, breeze and trees… You need to look, with closed eyes…

‘This universe is a memorandum of things incomplete,’ We begin, haphazard as we scratch off. The air is thin with silence running out. This begins with you, me and them. When we wake, big pencils enveloped in masks and blues stand before us, arms offering welcomes… those in hell smile the brightest so we squint, kick and scream. Without that, the finger next to us will prick again to remind us that this is a place of hot things. We open our mouths and scream till the pencils become umbrellas in various shades of smiles. There’s an envelope above scenting of warmth, difference and red. It’s shaped different from the pencils we’ve seen so we observe, keen as our eyes search into its… Its eyes glimmer, glow and dazzle blinding…

For each step made there are a million words as to how better we could have made it. It’s always easy to ask the Lion’s tale to counter the hunter’s, but none wants to do the scribbling. We pause. This world is a glass cup, so like cubes we dangle with every shake. Cubes are better doubled, so we search for the glimmer, for the glow. The first time we see a ray we buckle it in folded papers and slip into the source’s bag. Perhaps like the sun they too might be generous… But some rays are flickers of dead torches… This we find out before another pencil mouthing ways to climb the sky and how we’ve chosen the earth scourges us. But this earth is cool, soft and moist… We thin out…

The second time, we found a pillar of roaring flames, strong enough to scorch our being and burn from inside out. This time we walked towards the flame, and with our wears off became moses. Flames respond, so we burn until our flickers become embers and dust… But then, doesn’t one have to burn to come out brand new? We persevere. It’s decades and the attics of our minds have become libraries of many things. For instance, flames, glows and dazzles are just colours, like plants, growth and sky. Each for a different day, a different feeling, like an outfit worn to show what the heart has become. And the second… The door of our mind opens… We see it glow, glimmer, dazzle… Like the moon embracing the sun, the umbrella reappears…

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Poem © Okolo Chinua

Image: Raphael Renter Unsplash cropped