Flame On The Road Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

A flame on the road
brightening into a huge flower
of a rock-laden lady
gliding along with a house
on her flowing head.

She's the sun. She's the river.
She's the bun.

Baked by sky-shot rays.
Growing into the cornfield
beaming over her shoulders.

Steering a family out
of a narrow day of blisters turned
dry scars, the spar
that holds her in her seat
behind eagle-winged handlebars.

The pole she clings to
to touch a sky's drifting floor,
on which she walks,
riding to a home of rays.

The star that lifts her into air
to hang on a sky's ceiling
of love grown into and wrapped
in a smooth banana leaf
the size of a river-stretched breath,

as she rides a bicycle
carrying the hearth
of her home to burn by the green walls
of a bush. The bush too burns
with sunflowers gilding
with her on a tarmac's glittering face,

the beginning and end of man
spinning hazes
of light flying dust to stroke her
with fingers of a breeze.

(ii)

On her full-bodied old bicycle,
the rattling, warbling rolling bird
waving silver strings
of streams trickling down her temple,

she pedals like a feather
a forest and shamrock mountain,
as she carries on her head
the gaping silver bowl of a harvest,

grains of corn, the seeds
to mulch a family to grow out
of life's narrow ridges

stretching her to new borders
of a sun's stretch,
an under-sky of a smile
flying off her face, the air-piloting
robin whispering silently.

(iii)

Only a smooth stone
of propped thickening silence
grinds heavy air into the cream power
to lift her to her doorsteps
with the full load of a journey,

a toddler of a son gripping
albatross shoulders of handlebars,
his feet wedged
by the mud gauge over a wheel
kissing the road that mangles it.

The steel arms of a crossbar
carries the mountain
of a lady, the wedge of a loin-wrapped baby
cushioning another leaning toddler.

On a carrier slimmed
into muscled arms of metal,
lies a pile of slate and flint stems
of wood to join

a dance of tinder stirring flames
under a cauldron
she's already heated riding
on a windy bicycle
towards her doorsteps
of her sun-sprayed golden home.