Living in the 21st Century (12): El Paradiso

Louis Egbe Mbua



Fir trees from the water sprayed ground grow

To unimagined heights their kept tops float

Above the earth onto the shimmering skies

For before then no clouds an eye had seen.



Life-giving fruits from the fertile ground sprung;

Delightful and pleasing to human buds

And painting the earth like coloured sprays

That no human ever could ever have foreseen.



This was but the one part existing,

The other side of the new garden was

Not in the Eden East but hidden west

And on the shimmering West River side.



An afterthought so conceived like teens

That the East Garden in the cosmos it hangs

Strapped onto the unknown with a chasm

So far as no man a remote stretch attempts.



But insists with little foresight the other one;

Conjuring illusions from sources unknown

That the Hanging Gardens were paradise

To be kept, pruned and worked on site.



Hours passed, toil and sweat they exude,

Floods of tears were the fruitless outcome

Cries and groans were heard across the north:

“Where is the fruit, where are the flowers?”



They heard a chorus from the proverbial pruned

Garden trees, voices well watered and trimmed:

“We are in the real celestial El Paradiso !“

“But you are in the Fool’s Paradise!”