Climb On My Back Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Climb on my back. Then roll on
over my lumpy shoulders
and show me yours, so seems
to speak the hills to me
and to each other, curving through,

weaving themselves
through shrubby heights
and cylindrical stone
pillars pushing back falling rocks
perched on higher slopes

into valley baskets of flowering
trees and shrubs hugging
each other after a race of soft
and bumpy undulations.

One tall hill bounces
over shorter strolling peaks
in a feat of acrobatic displays,

as they stagger and strut
and swagger, ducking the barnacled
scratches on the faces
of old frowning wrinkled canyons.

That bring colorful stretches
to drag themselves
on their bellies over flower-starred
mounds and soft knolls.

(ii)

Climb over my back, I'll jump
over yours to the Senqunyane,

the silver string of a river dividing
a stretch of slopes into lobes
in two different galloping worlds.

Let me climb and jump
over your backs too, I tell the mountains,
as I go out for a walk

during a sun-splashed mid-morning.
I brush through the fire
of yarrow and corymbose flowers
and the blaze of tulips and salvia
and coxcombs and aloe and cactus.

Climb on my back, Climb on,
and I'll take you to tracks
flanked by birds swooshing off
to homes in the valleys

along small slithering streams,
where swans bump up like cream
clouds settled on sparkling
silver waters for a break.

(iii)

But its not yet time to split,
as a mighty rock bumps up
with its saddle for a ride on stone
horseback galloping back
down to the lowlands of Maseru.

But its just a wish a dwarf
beggar like me with no legs can ride,
for the horse is so still and frozen
it cannot even trot over
a on-inch space - far shorter than

the giant stone's heavy waist
and mile-long feet laced
with sparse herbage, and buttoned
with tufts and goatees
of closely roped and knotted tufts of grass.


Qachas Nek, Lesotho,2004