Less Than Flames Of Love Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

A pop and a dog growling, a fire's voice.
Peonies and sunflowers hatched
gold and flaxen. Suns went off a black roof
with the yellow boubou of a flame,

sprayed sky with canary flags
shedding medallion feathers
on dandelion wings, swooshing out
feathered red and blue ribbons.

Dancing after a child's wing-flapping
medallion kite had flown
and dropped. Spiraling after yellow winds
had ridden bikes and bicycles
through lifted and tilted hanging screens.

One giant yellow bird wallowed,
flapped it wings again and again
until firemen stormed the roof,
halting the flow of a yellow flying river.

(ii)

The flames flipped themselves over,
like a thick yellow book thumbed
by the wind's flying hands coated
with soot and woolly sheathes of smoke.

She blotted off both heat and cinder,
wriggled with pain hurled not by fire,
but by the past family deaths -

a niece, a cousin, an uncle, a friend
dropped to showers and clouds of dust
in their silver and golden beds,
death wheeling them off on a bridge
to a castle on a mountain top.

In the bowl of her pain, as she wailed,
only coals of the past glowed,
only past gales of flames devoured her,

leaving a mask of ash and soot
from crystals and flowers
from old memories, the roaring fire
before her just an empty lion.