Groom Your Gloom Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

His grandfather's monody
always thundered in him,
when he'd grown tons of mulch

for clouds over a leaking crater:
"Groom your bloom" it boomed.

The man's friends had dug
a trench to swallow
his past brushes with his father

and village elders, who'd
faced storm and collapsing cliffs
throughout their narrow lives.

The man alone had dug a tunnel
to store old skirmishes
and multiple jabs he'd taken

from stone-muscled comrades,
who'd bulldozed hills
into level paths and tracks

to towers in a jungle
that had just breathed in light
as sharp as his lances
stropped to clear off
overgrown weeds and shrubs.

(ii)

His younger family icons
slotted as breadwinners
and bearers of the torch

to pave their way out of ditches
and gulches that had built them
still carried night on

broken shoulders and rains
bloated them into valley clouds.

They'd not shaken off hills
of old skirmishes
that had built up in mounds
into a thick engulfing nimbus.

But he would not be devoured
by the clouds of those
who'd crumbled under life's bull horns.

He continued to walk on his tunnel
carrying broken crystals,
reaching out to more clouds
to groom his path out of a gorge.

(iii)

A cloud weaves winds
into a gale. And loosens threads
of breeze to thicken
a storm already growing into
a forest of hurricanes.

His house is a hill of clouds,
but he's been toweling off
all the mud that has been spilled on him.

His spaced grins have flattened
out ridges of wrinkles

smoothed into mulch for beams
throughout his flowering day,
strings of sun rays his garland.