Seven threatened gods
By Abraham Nwankwo
The Seven, who before ruled heaven and earth,
Decided to destroy the earth in wrath,
Because terribly evil and proud, man had become;
Only one family of a righteous man exempted.
Before then the gods had a guardian spirit,
Stationed on earth in a cave of stones;
Who kept the secret book of life,
And taught man how to righteously in truth live,
To attain harmony with the gods above.
After the deluge the earth had devastated,
To heaven, the angel of light was recalled.
But the book, in the debris of the deluge was trapped,
In the Mboko valley where it lay.
One thousand years later, was picked by Ekon;
He studied it and began to live in Truth.
The College of Seven Gods was very pleased with him;
So elected he would be a god when he died.
But Ekon was still fallible while on earth.
The Evil One who before had man, deceived,
The one that caused the curse of the harsh deluge,
Tempted Ekon to digress from the path of Truth,
Into vanity, wealth-seeking, greed and sex.
The Seven was agitated, for if Ekon in this state died,
He would still the divine college join,
‘Cause the decree of gods cannot be changed.
But he would contradiction, to divinity bring.
And cosmic balance would, to chaos, be lost.
Heaven and earth would, in catastrophe explode,
Reality, to nothingness, would surely melt.
To avert, they afflicted him with poverty and paralysis:
And, in downcastedness, he became sober and repentant.
For seven years he mourned: wearing banana leaves,
Lived on begging from house to house;
Living strictly according to the Book of Life.
As soon as he regained purity, angels carried him:
Thus the Seven and the universe from doom were saved.
