The  hood less traveled: Post-nuptial blues

The night after my world  ended

I wear my new dress and sit under the udara tree

Dressed-up wife, full-time lover, friend, jailmate

The minister's words echoing in my soul

For better or for worse

I watch the moonwoman in her eternal pose

Armed with an ax to Bobbit her man

Others say it's the caring moonman

Splitting wood to warm the heart of his beloved

Happy tunes filter out from  the hut behind

My husband is getting ready for bed

What he has to be happy about beats me

For it's the night after my world ended

I've been many things to many people

And gone through the gauntlet of hoods

Childhood, adulthood, womanhood, parenthood

Wifehood was the hood yet untraveled

Until my world ended when the moon was full

Will the moonwoman get the job done

Does  the moonman love his wife that much

Each version a woman's hope of hate and love

He must be the adoring provider

Or else, she'd  take the ax to his tool

It's the night after my world ended

A world where the river running

at the edge of  the village square couldn't stop me

And the sky vanished at my approach

Life was mine to live, for better or for worse

In this hood, this new world

I awake, not to the prompting of the cockcrow

Or the voices of  women on their way to the stream

Pots balanced daintily on their heads

Their waists swinging from side to side

In perfect peace with their womanhood

Now I'm aroused into wakefulness

By the hands of my full-time lover

Probing in search of my distant soul

In this new world, he's the Man in the hood

The cock that crows me out of slumber

To face the dawn after my world  ended

It's the night after the end of my world

I stir to the touch of my full-time lover

As he gently pulls me up from my stool

I yield to his embrace with hope in my heart

And slowly we dance into a brand new world -- our world

Patience Akpan, circa 1996