Homeless Sparrow Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Soft whistles blow through
thick leather air brushing
with afterfeathers of a wind
into a humming thrum
until it thins into a breeze.

Whirring to a thick buzz,
a storm pushes and pushes
with mooing poking horns
against a slim grassy home
hanging off a tree branch.

Like a broken see-saw,
the home is ripped apart
into specks and lose flying fibers
spiraling off into mist
in unclothed air in silver skin.

(ii)

Like a tumbling mountain,
a nest cracks and crashes
into hollow corridors of air.

A sparrow tossed out
of its leaking grass hole
that once was a roofed fort,
flaps its wings in the cold.

And off, bouncing in helices,
it flies to colder, stormier
nebula of an outer mass of air.

Homeless sparrow in cyan
ether dwindling into a thinner
shade of blue, you've lost
your reed-brick home.

You're left to nest in cobwebs
Of flying twisting air,
O floating strings on claws
and crushed ruffled feathers.

But you still spin your wings
through blue skies growing
into a sea of windy drizzles.

How does a hollow squeeze
you in, flips you over,
but you still dive through shears
to settle on gossamer strings,

as you tunnel you way out
through a nebula
of dark clouds
caught in a forest of rising stems

and trunks of further clouds.
You're getting there.
Wriggle through, twist and push
against stronger winds

to reach the hill that bounces
you back home, reeds
and palmate leaves in your mouth.

(iii)

It's now gray dawn,
since you turned
homeless at sienna dusk
sizzling with storm.

But you've lost nothing,
your mountain will
still holding you firm,
as you make
a thousand trips

to a hillside for reeds
and leaves
for a rock-woven nest,

a new gripping home
in a tree's bunker of elastic
brick leaves, will's clay.