My Uncle's Tales Poem by Tony Adah

My uncle is a tall man
He tells tall tales
As If he believes them himself
He told us that while in his farm
A white man stuck out his head
From an aircraft and threw him a coin
And the coin never present
Missed as it was given.

Again back in his farm
A certain bird defaecated on
His head with a ring that carried
Some code in numbers and alphabets
For this he showed us a nut
With treads in it
He picked from the bicycle repairer's shop.

He told us that
He saw a pangolin giving birth
To bees that were all stillbirths
That he knew a giant man
Who kept the tails of all toads
In a pot in his fetish grove
And the tails had no voice
To howl a call across to the waiting toads.

We believed him
And believed everything
That there was a man
In the next village who since
The world began had not died
And will never die
Such were my uncle's tall tales.