The Shell Of Silence Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

In a wrecked ship limping
behind rising mountains' shoulders,
a shadow in the broken sun,

silence sits in a shell, its walls
the ruffled tapered castle
that rolls a snail along
a cemented home of its own
on a shore everybody strokes.

Its cloak is a finch's armor
of midnight quietness built
of unbreakable reeds,
a nest of closely interwoven fiber
in a cage of stone.

its breezy room builds a fort
to nestle within other shells,
every cocoon an island
off the universe of stormy waves.

(ii)

But in life's typhoon,
the snail and the finch, hurled
into a cave in a hole,
each build a carapace to crawl
with the tortoise.

A wind expands a condor's reach
in a world of many tortoises,
which clunk against each other,
as they crawl in narrow lanes.

In their shells, each mollusk
and bird of silence
on an island
no ship has scraped its shores,
crawl and dance
to the music of clunking silence.

(iii)

And by the cliff's edge
of a storm-tossed boulder,

the mollusk and the bird
crawl out of a narrow miss

only to find themselves
in the caved mouth
of a roaring ebbed-out wave,
anthills of foam and spume
shooting with biting bullets.