Ash On Cactus Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(for victims of the Ngarbuh-Ntumbaw massacre in Ambazonia)

(i)

White arrow-pointed sails of ash
on thick-palmed cactus spin
a dome of air, a king's umbrella at night,

a hooting star-crowned ship
drifting to a wave's hollow
beyond sun's splashed gold, a moon opening
eyes wider than sun. The world hollows out.

Towing wide open
a gate to a congregation of barged men
bowing to weave barges

of flames and the red berets of blood
to cover children in their ship of sleep.

(ii)

The growing pyramid of the world floats
and flows through a peaked earth.
Earth's brown mattress is a spiked hearth.

The world floats and floats on the drift
of a somersaulting feather,
tilts on the shift of a wing in the storm.

How the world swells
into the beefy palms and thorny beards

that spiraled warmth brewed from a desert's
hearth with no furnace, but a cream
air of white butterflies stitching each other
with threads of warmth.

A cactus' palms carrying scabies
are not the graveled mat
of a desert stretching brown dust and dunes

beyond a shore running
into a lurking shark's mouth,
vampire bats blowing flutes of flames, as boots
beat the leathered drum of earth.

(iii)

Weaves of gazes thrown across
burning flames of love
ignited the bonfire, over which a storm fire
of cackles cracked a thick earth-molded wall.

Khaki men from the bottom
of a stretchy spasmic volcano of hate flew in
with a storm hurled out
from the volcano's deep throat.

The children spun, as abandoned as a desert
in the hollowed-out space
of a home drifting to a broken jumping cliff
in snores and rumbles,
a thunder of life running over sleeping children.

How the world spins
on a feather's notch.

On a speck of ash, earth rolled on punctured
wheels to the stretching lake,
where a river of life disembogues,
sinking lotus for a new hatching season,
when birds fly a new life and children never die.

How a womb of night
snatches back children on the mountain
of a burnt home.