Since my sister's eyelashes were born again,
no one in my family has seen their faces,
or rather their tentacles and pinnacles,
the soft ends of their luscious tips
which have been in prayer mode
for the greater part of my sister’s eighteenth year.
How her eyelashes, which in tender years lay low,
decided to turn to God at such a time,
is something even my parents’ detractors admit,
to be one of the rare miracles of my generation,
when girls lie dead by their eyelashes,
or soldiers lay in ambush within their thick folds,
or some dirty men in my community,
whom my friends described as Agadi n’agwo ofe,
plucked out in the darkness of the day
steal, conquer and destroy this landscape of beauty and joy.
When my sister grew like tender tendrils,
her pyramid of eyelashes sailed toward the sky,
with well-worked plans for the darkness of the clouds,
and how to dance her way down to earth.
My sister’s eyelashes grew like lumpy leaves to the sky,
and claimed Heaven as her only worthy inheritance,
where she would dance with the stars,
and sips the dews of an approaching dawn
through the forest of eyelashes and a valley of eyes,
sitting delicately on the cliffs of her nose.
Grown and pruned like a hedge of roses,
My sister's eyelashes flourished in the evening of her days
like fresh daisies planted on the graves of our mother,
where each man who professed to love and hold her,
must attempt to pluck out a stem of the hair
like uprooting one oak tree from a forest,
and nurse it into another forest away from the pack.
Otherwise, if he failed to pass this simple task,
be sure to abstain from marriage for the rest of his life.