Horseman Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

The man was dressed
in a jungle of grasses and leaves.
Not garlands
to shine his face with sun,

but a yelling smile
twisting his mouth
into a pouting fish without gills.

Not wreathes to ring
the bells of a budding jubilee,
but a bulging crab
gripping his cheeks with ribbons
of a beaming frown spun

to sprawl with marsh
in his flattened bowl of mind,
the place of crawling ants
chaining themselves


He rode through the hills
from Mbingo to Anjin
and through impassable Wombong,
compounds glowing

in palisades of flowering shrubs,
leaving only the grand public road
as the falcon

to fly the horse rider
beyond sky-scrapping walls
of trees and piked rising rock
racing to the sky.

(ii)

Under the moon
breathing out sheathes
and sheets of light
rolling out to the brighter light

of predawn unfolding
expanding cream
and glassy silver to fall
in showers of a night sun,

its rays shot at him
with tasers of beams,
but never blinded him,

as he galloped on
through thorny bushes
and trees flipping out
low scratching branches.

He rode on in a narrow space
between walls of high
rising rocks flipping out wings
of dust from the eroded
breaking skin of hills

attired in crocodile bark cloaks
scrubbing the horse rider's
scarred skin breaking into rough rocky
backs of the hills he climbed.

(iii)

He arrived with little lungs
at his uncle's door
only strong enough to bark out

with a smiling frown
that he had he had lost
a huge field of fruit trees
he had been mulching for years.

We can grow many more trees,
said the uncle,
but the horse rider burst out

with a thunder
that roared and yelped that
carnage had put the village

in flames, every ridge
of breathing folks rising to the sky
in cruising dark dust.