Over the hills yonder The shy sun stirs a new sky blue As stars fall to sleep asunder

A congregation of daffodils greet ‘how do you do?’

Children of the wind sail towards the east

Red-winged messengers of the Morning

With them the dews of yesterday’s feast

Silent, beckoning the promise of a new Yawning

Dance with the Elders afar – excited old men, they are! And the travelling band

…an echo away,

Unseen, fill the grass with green and…ah!

The grand orchestra that is my Morning plays to you,

my lass

Awake and heed this performance won! And when your eyes shall flutter open, Another forever will be done.

Far away in Chennai, India, a young Tamil-speaking Iranian-British-Nigerian-Indian girl

dreamed of her Nigerian father and longed for him to hold her again…the same way he had

done, every night, before he said goodbye and walked towards the mist beyond the falls. In

her dreams, he whispered his love for her and played with her long curly mulatto hair. He

said all will be well – just as she woke up to the milky morning that greeted the streets of

Egmore.

At that instant, a young Nigerian boy in Lagos, shut his eyes and prepared for bed. In his

hand was a letter from his father. He read it on many nights. He missed his father…dearly.

Years later, these two unlikely strangers from two different worlds would meet, and find in

each other the very things their poetic souls really missed the most: the joy of imagination

and vulnerability, the playfulness of life, the sacredness of a shared pilgrimage, and the

sternness of love. And when EJ blushingly said yes to Bayo, at a Thai Cuisine in Pune,

India, they found the greatest of these: each other.

Meadow Green, Rusty Brown & Gold

10 Degrees Event Centre, Plot A2, Opposite

Unilever, Billingsway Road, Oregun Industrial

Estate, Ikeja, Lagos

June 11, 2011; (Garden Service) 10 am

‘Eden’ Garden, Opposite Vivian

(Also called Oregun Industrial Road), Ikeja, Lagos

Secretariat, Lagos, Nigeria, Africa

Fowler Memorial College, Billingsway Road,