A Rockhead Of Dying Folks Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(for mangled Ambazonian children and mothers)

(i)

Wind brushing off a rockhead
of folks twisted to see
the glow of their splayed flesh,

their calves and soles laid out
before them by the waved
stropped knife of a buzzing storm,

O folks pecked by a red-lipped
eagle fleeing behind a scampering squirrel.

Stabbed stones of men
lying behind a mountain

of their shadows
stretched to a missing sun,

a one-eyed moon lurking
behind children
who've abandoned their bodies
to arcs of two-eyed suns…

(ii)

O mangled fledglings
still to grow life's wings…

Are you taking a break
by the bridge of life

you couldn't cross to a land
only you couldn't see
with closed eyes sealed

by an endless trench
of night from Sirius corridor?

Hairs in the silent wind,
their squiggles of bodies

flown across a river of love
flowing like lawn-dried linen
pulled by gusts

from the mouths of babies
who could not whimper
on a bed that cut us off.

(iii)

O river of waters from drools
splashed and sprinkled
down cheeks far flung above a sun
baking a red river in stitches.

Growing more red under
a banyan tree by waters screaming
quietly to the waterfalls
building a bed of silt
with no mattress to hug babies
one more time O waters

jumping with a wild horse's strides
when a red sky collapses
on a land of spun poppies,

flowers shedding off
scars from sleeping hearths,
coals in the mouth of a volcano.

They lie behind the bobbing
amaryllis of sealing its leaking lips
over the screaming bones,

mothers clinging to hydrangea
from folks in dark headscarves
blending with a night
of rolling interwoven caves of men
powdered with an eclipse's soot.