Check out my poem “Mysticism in the Dark” on Verse Daily, which featured the The Local World on December 9, 2011. The poem begins with an adaptation of a passage from Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart:

As children we were warned not to whistle at night for fear of evil spirits.
Dangerous animals became even more
sinister and uncanny in the dark.
A snake was never called by its name at night because it would hear.
It was called a string . . .