Firmament Of My Bed Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(to my deity)

(i)

In the howling winter wind,
I wasn't seized
by a pack of wolves.

Lions in the roaring
evening gale
didn't scratch or maul me,

as I tottered up
a holed path
through an eroded track
to my front gate.

You gave me
a firm cypress cane
to push me,
as I trotted and hopped.
And galloped
onto my unpaved way

to my fleeing door
in the strong-
handed wind.

You showed me
the staircase
for a crawled climb
to my apartment door

that raised
a high, high wall
against my door's panel.

(ii)

And I crept up
and jumped down
the broken
screaming door

to the marbled floor
of my living room.

As it raised
its flying ceiling
high up
the tunneled sky

of my narrow
cream space
towering
above the hanging lamps.

But when I pulled in
from the corridor
a ladder
with the broken legs
of a tumbled giraffe,

I could climb no more,
my own legs
numb
like soil-glued boulders.

But the wings
of my will
whispered and bawled out

at me, as I croaked
in my ringing pain
without even a frog's legs:

"You're only half-way
up your journey
until a rocket orison
tosses you up

from an arched
tree branch
to a flowered crown,
the firmament of your bed".