A Coastal Myth

The clarinet waves touched the moon.

He walked like a rooster in the moonlight,

bewitched by the music and the light. The

caparisoned elephants swayed their heads

to the drumbeats. A dozen half-naked virgins

danced around a bronze devil. “Human smell!”

Everything vanished in the blackout. That

escaped fisherman appeased the dark deity…

With a wavering voice and goose-bumps,

my wizened neighbor recounts thus the

myth behind the coastal festival. I enjoy

the false beauty. There is no analyzer in

his thinking system. Superstition is highly

inflammable in his illiterate inland. Such

beliefs flourish here in the thick Fantasy

Forest, where the reason rays never fall.

First published in The Literary Hatchet.