As A Leopard Unbolts Dawn Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(song of a freedom fighter)

(i)

A young man in dawn's nimbus
pulls up his puttees
and tugs in a sky of a hat

down his temple
to his giraffe-stretched neck.

Then he listens to his own
bawling voice piercing
his wide-open rabbit ears

hurling him - like a catapulted
spear - into the stretchy
field of another rumbling day:

***

Passenger skipping out
your train of night,
pounce out in your fur of you

O leopard wearing
claw-studded boots perched
on a bloated rocky spiky hill of you

and mountain soles
to stretch your neck across sky slabs
and silver trees of rain

you brush off like twisted
spears of flying drizzles,
those thorns that fly
with the wings of hawks.

Skip and spring out
and ride on a cat's spine snarling

with a growing groaning storm
of boots breaking earth and sky,
as air's walls tumble.

(ii)

Come out now from the cave
of your sheathed and blanketed
sleep, a stony ceiling

under a rising flamy roof having
swollen to the top of your tower.

A blackboard of sky hangs
down in dawn's thick lake of air.
In a plastic dawn
scrolling down flip charts of stars,

an early pink sun has begun
to bake grass and stalks
for your floating flying boots.

Cling to those squiggles
on the rolled-down screen of charcoal
dawn dotted with stars,
from which he reads and listens
to a captain rumbling in him:

(iii)

When bush and jungle spin a flier
winged at early dawn
with blades of feathers to cut
through a cloudy haze of night,

as you grip fibers and fragments
of thick knotty air
with the claws of a lion we've stuck
to your scorpion hands,

tear down a heavy blanket
of dark dawn to see light -

to slash through bushes and vines
curling into you
like toothless snakes blindfolded
by your flickering starry light.