By Oppong Clifford Benjamin
I was as sure as faith and dance
as darkness and its absence
and as heaven and humans-
I had no doubt that God was here
And that God was there too;
In sins, He was here and
in the holiest of holies, He was there.
It was a dark room under a dark rainy sky
with the stars hidden behind frowning clouds
The air carried everything including our doubts
on its carelessly chaotic cold paths to nowhere
It was the sound of percussion instrument playing
Playing soft hymns to the atmosphere unseen
On the floor, seated we were:
Legs crossed. Right on left leg
right palm in left.
A black candle burned its wax away
to illuminate our dark life someways
Kiky had mastered her craft.
She was in a black cassock
She looked ahead of my head
And closed her eyes again softly.
She didn't want to breath
She didn't want to call my name
I watched her dance to the heavens;
Head bent to the feet,
Her hips curved around the dark,
Hands thrown to the near west
Heartbeats in accordance with every bit
of nature. It was with the rains on the roof.
I watched her turn into air and
back to a shadow on the wall
I watched her move back and forth
between the present world and trance
She danced her glory off,
She divined our future
And I looked on with anxious surprise.
And my lover finally became everything
I couldn't have been,
everything I had only dreamt of;
The room walls
The moment
The air
The candle
The dark
And God
And Kiky was God
And God was Kiky
And God was us.
She opened her eyes abruptly and
spoke to the silence and it broke
As above so below, she said and smiled.
