(We are pleased to welcome the readers to five full days of Jonathan Chibuike Ukah–The Eds.)

When I grew old and bold enough to understand

the difference between the laughter of the forests

and the grinning of the flowers of our garden,

my father showed me the stone of his forefathers.

His great-grandfather hewed it from an ancient rock

which built the stalagmite walls of the Woku River,

where the young women of my village fetched water

when drought possessed the land like the night;

or famine ate the fields like a band of locusts.

My father told me that the sea that overflowed

in the Harmattan during the anger of the moon,

or the River Niger that surged beyond its banks,

had swept over the rock a thousand times a day

and rendered it wrinkled, rough and cracked.

My grandmother planted flowers around it,

and dug up the ruin in its base with tenderness,

that though the wind ceased near our compound,

the stone had enough air to breathe and live.

On the surface of the stone lay names of my forefathers

whose wives and mothers tended to the stone

and preserved its hardness and longevity till now,

that time would not erode its beauty and strength,

standing as a bond between the past and the present.

He told me how crazy the rain had become of late,

that swept over the stone with wild gales and storms,

yet did not wash away the names of my ancestors,

that stood out in the garden like light on a hill.

It became a scene of dusk and darkness in the sun,

weathered by time, fractured by a cruel touch,

the stone lay on the ground like an old carcass.

I asked my father about my mother’s name,

which the stone did not display to the town.

“Your mother did not clean the stone till her death,

and now it stooped not to bloom again at her time.”

My eldest sister said mother killed the old stone

after father sprinkled the blood of a goat on it,

as an annual sacrifice to the gods of the land,

that we might have life and have it abundantly.

Even stones wilt, whittle, decay and die away

if care, love and affection pass them by.

Jonathan Chibuike Ukah