A Shower Of Birds Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Thunderstruck by wounds
bleeding your core out,
you wince and snivel
under a bouncing hurricane.

But a cough from ashy reeds
in the sprayed fire
digging deeper and deeper
tosses back your yolk
to its firm spinning eggshell,

as dicotyledonous friends
bind themselves again
to grab the earth harboring
every split part of loam.

Brewed from the same seeds.
And mulched on ridges,
rising as tall plants to jump high.

And higher through mid-air
clouds and sailing diamond hue
pulling you in, as you snatch
your fear-haired self
to stand in the breeze
unfolded into a punching gale.

Dropping puffs and pops
Into fueled crowing ditches
to devour you with a choking grip.

(ii)

You rise up, parched
by glowing and ashy bowels
of a wide-mouthed
spitting and yawning volcano.

Growing dashing red birds
amid yellow goldfinches
and cardinals with no hood
to fly with raised hands
over a cloud-drowned
catechumen's spiraling head

left to hover and bloom
on the canopy of a volcano
swelled in memories
anchored in fumes and smoke.

that budded and bloomed
with you until your heads
touched sun and star,
ballooning you into sky itself.

(iii)
Now you're wrapped up
in ebony fumes thickening
their grip of you.

Now you're head-geared
with the same birds
that landed on gossamer fibers
of your volcano's roof.

And you sit out here
under the same sun
in silver crowns
that dropped rolling thorns

and needles of sparks
to chew you off
in a drummed, gonged gulp.

But the world flips open
a parachute to land you
in a gorge of night.

And, as you're pulled in
by a noose
on a galloping cliff's edge,
those birds that hovered over
your volcano
come out of a closet.

And fall on your yard
In the feathers and wings
of pigeons and doves

to swell you back up with them
into a cerulean sky
with no dark patch
or stretching sienna borehole.

And the rain of birds
is cleaning you, as thick rays
of memory towel you up.