Ensemble Tramping Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Nothing to pack up,
but bones and muscles
for a stiff trip,
streams of sweat
bathing us in a desert

of silent eyes darted
at each other
like dumb and mute titmice
gone astray
on hard screens of night.

Lips stitched and sewn
tight and hemmed in
for the round of thread
to wriggle through pleats
of folded-over lips

glued with the sticky latex
from a tree of silence

growing taller
than our stone heads
spinning on ropy necks
pushed and pulled

by stretchy elastic
shoulders talking only
with dripping streams
and slobber
from dried-up mouths,

babies and infants
on shoulders of older folks
wetter in their drools
than everybody else
on a foggy misty morning,

smoke flowing out
from hearths
of quiet sold-out mouths.

(ii)

Quiet, but untired,
and with no loud lyre
in a procession,
birds blow alto flutes
along this winding strip.

Trumpeted winds
fly with humming sound.

And hornets
of rolling breezes
whirr and buzz, tight-lipped,
as we tramp on, stones
in our legs and feet.

And as we trudge on,
calves heavy bleating
young cows,
up to the altar
of a standing peak,
sneezes play sighing cymbals,

a shrubby and tall tree
waving the flags
and ribbons of branches
and leaves
at our thumping arrival,

our engine
marching feet
on the spot marking time,
drilling in time.

We're all actors,
our troupe of legs
pedaling legs,
our only drums, as we
trudge, drumming

undressed ochre earth
on the stony
staircases of our road
up to the peak
of a steep laddered hill,

swollen piercing
back and shoulder muscles,
the only empty
bag packs we carry
with no flutes, no drum sticks
for our size drums,

O drummers in a world
with no drums.
O flautists in a world
of no flutes,

as we carry only reeds
in parched breath
at our arrival
on a hill's peak, our gods
bawling at us:

Dive down, swing
down back
to the feet of your climb
and do it again:

Repent for all the ants
you've killed on your tracks,
or else, you're musicians
hacked and cleaved
for a new cauldron of life.