In one of my careless mind wanderings and meanderings, I happened upon a garden. The garden was a walled city with beautiful golden gates rimmed in with costly pearls. The entrance gate wore the smile of the sun and glittered like a shimmering glassy river. It was a glorious sight that evoked an ethereal ambience.
Beyond the gates, is a massive orchard of palms on the right, the whispers they produced when the winds pass under their wings were so sonorous that you’d think angels were humming a melody of Psalms. On the left, I saw hills and tiny mountains, behind which children played hide and seek games, and pretentiously cooked and ate dinner on stones, like mummy and daddy would do. All around were scattered little huts and houses that told the story of peace and family.
The beauty of the lush green expanse of land in the middle, crisscrossed by many rivers that reflected the face of God in an early morning sunlight, an evidence of a thoughtful landscaping. The two major rivers empty into themselves as one body in a marriage of convenience. The Atlantic ocean applauds such honour with a wave offering.
The lilies in this massive stretch of hectares of land lived like a family of many tongues, and just when I thought that this was a happily ever after vision. I noticed towards the end of the garden, a dark river began to flow and soon the soil of the once green and innocent garden became darkened and the bloodred river consumed a million seeds in three minutes. This divided the garden into three unequal portions and lilies no longer lived as siblings.
Suddenly, wild yams began sprouting out of the ground of neighbouring gardens, and broke down the city walls.
A tuber woke up in a garden he didn’t plant. He arose from his bed of clay
and ate his fill. The yam became the chief of the garden, brought down the beautiful gates of gold and melted it in a furnace. He carved out a golden calf and then declared the garden as a republic that runs on the moos of the golden calf. The calf became a god and the tuber its high priest.
The lilies rejected the golden calf as king, the tuber king declared some wild lilies as weeds, and allowed such tender lilies to be trampled by armoured turtles. The shelled turtles ate wild lilies in their numbers and soon enough all lilies had become wild. A young lily lost its head in the battle between wild lilies and turtles, tuber king didn’t bother a condolence card. The garden hurriedly swallowed ghosts of innocent lilies like flies. Wild yams delighted in eating young lilies of few moons in their hundreds, colourful robes of innocence and inked dreams.
The lilies could only whimper in protest, as one by one they started losing their huts and houses to wild yams that came through the fences of other gardens. As lilies that could speak had their mouths covered with oil from black rivers, as oil became thicker than blood.
Several seasons later, tubers owned a garden, whose planter they refuse to know. There’s no end to their appetites. So the tubers with their golden calves began to eat more lilies and land. Suddenly, the garden had become a massive ruin full of wild yams and their weeds, as the golden calf became both god and king.
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