A Glass Screen Of Memory Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(a special emerald bead for Agnes Josiane Bongjoh)

(i)

Through a glass screen of memory
you wave at me every day, every chime,
over a river of toys flowing on a bed
spinning with wings of thought.

Through a sharp-rayed daylight of you
sitting in the couch waiting for a bud
to blossom across dad's cheeks,
the pillow between you and me grows

a lawn. Sprouts into creeping grass,
beneath which we find the pencil
you've been trying to rake out of dry twigs
and bearded tree branches of clothes.

You rake out a diary in Virgin Mary's
safekeeping smoothening out a grin,
arching you to a drawer by your bed, a spiral
of leaves and flowers of satin drapery

stretched out into a piece of sky,
from which you begin the day walking
amid limping rocks lowering heads
in sprinting galloping streets full of rested toys.

(ii)

Through the glass screen in a canoe, a day's paper
on the river of your sleep floating you down
with stars in syzygy sailing like new script,
I find your handwriting on scribbles of a tear.

I find the buzzing lines of a day through notes,
the anchor in the harbor you poured out
with sheets of rose petals, as you wailed with me,
after I'd been hit by the lightning of your aunt's death.

On your bed, I sit in the cabin of a ship
dressed in the rays of a laugh that bounced off
a horizon, hit a rising mountain of trees,

branches shedding green ribbons wind-driven
to fields in the desert, the dusk that landed on you.