Crane Stretching Out A Crane Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

I live in a house by River Platte
roofed by black sheets
made of thousands
of arrow-headed flying cranes

keeping my house in a shade
throughout a stretched
mid-morning crawling
into a quivering afternoon of winds
on a sunny gold-rayed day.

A storm roars and settles
on my brow, as I stand
on a stone slab deep in a gorge
harboring a swift deluge
running through a roaring river.

Dry leaves and rattling twigs
in the wind have fallen -
from trees standing high
above on banks close to the sky -

into the waters growling
with a hum and howling
with dogs and leopards,
rushing down a cascaded slope,

all life and debris dumped
down a deep floor, as the deluge
pours and spills out more

tawny and carob waste in strings
of jumping, cartwheeling
waters spilling and spreading
into a watershed.

(ii)

Deluge, unfasten your ropes
of water. Deluge, leave me
by a watershed.
O running waters, leave me
by my shadowshed,

blisters in the blizzard
of my pain
hurling me down
a stony slope of sword-tongued
pebbles and cobblestones.

On a whispering
watershed's shallow edge,
I stand drifted
to a rattling beige,

waters filtered and sifted
by shifting breezes
and howling winds.

On its inches-deep waters
cleared by a piercing
brightening sun,
stands a crane stretching its neck
on its tail's shadow, as it sips drops

of water, the pistons
of another storm brewing
bobbing racing winds
caught between the walls
of rough rock stretching out
to a bank I cannot reach.

(iii)

O crane stretch out
your neck
into a jib poking a sky,
your wings the boom pendant
drawing me up

to the jib tip sheave,
as I roll down
and grip a job fore-stay pendant,

a door from boom tip sheaves
opening into my living room,
where I sit

stretching out a crane's neck
to my doorsteps, as I drop off
a trolley dumping me
into my couch to snail with me
through a roaring storm,

as floods from my eyes
feed rivers running into a watershed
beneath my cheeks,

the bugle calls of a trotting crane
joining a stretched chorus,
the rattling buzzing carnival
of a roaring long-necked machine.