Meeting With My Daughter After Her Trip (To The Horizon) Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(to my departed beloved daughter, Agnes Josiane Bongjoh) .

(i)

Why did the wrecked ship toss us
into a living room, two couches split by a mountain?
A roar plants a swollen belly
building running walls
and stiff slopes, the flying strides of storm waves.

In love's hurricane the lion of earth
has tossed me into your arms.
I ride a giraffe standing on an elephant's back,
flanked by daffodils and tulips.

Pole to pole. One stands
on the broken marbled floor of November,
the other on a burning slab of memory.

How was the edge of your drool
on my large palmate palm,

the leaf you flew from, the swirl that tossed
to the edge of a whale-wave

spiraling on a soft wheel through the rails
of my palm lines branching out

to islands of you and me, a canary
waiting with a song to unfold our life
on a green and silver canopy

to the fort a sea shore's bench showering us
with crawling buttons of a wisteria
tightening up the gaping edges
of a sky-laddered absence on a staircase?

(ii)

Punch me in and out. Drill me in, as I hang
down a stiff crusty wall
of soaked heavy breaking bricks, holding me in

with love nails. Pulling out scales
from the huge scar of your absence.

My nails are hanging out with bobbing heads.
Hit me. Drill me in as I stand
Arm to arm with you. Knock me out

with your cotton ball punches
lifting me like a crane.
Raising me upstairs to your breath.

Lifting me to the tree growing flowers
in this bed, flipping out branches,
from which I slip onto the floor of lighthouse,

from which I see you folded up
in the rolled-out billowing wave of a grin.
How stars trot on horses
flying with you and me dressed in giggles

into my only winged and flying wedge -
you and you in me.
A bud rooted in my palms and yours,

from which stroke and fondle
are built - two hills
stretched out on your tongue
lifting me to the tower

of your eyes, in which I sleep on the shore
of your bouncing sea,
rolled by the waves of a book,

each sheet the curved and splashed page
uncovering from a ceiling the sky,
a line of stars the only scribbles I read

(iii)

I jump out from eyes, a mirror standing you.
Air sculpts you out.
I jump out from my eagle chest
for a hug
in your extended tree-branch arms sweeping

starred skies to spread out
with us in this bed standing, ambling
on giraffe legs

under the firm nailed-in ceiling
of your breath, the breeze of a sheet,
on which you roll towards me.

Every shift pulls in a garden,
every space
the rose's large mouth and breath.

You've grown so tall. You've grown
into a tree from a breeze
under your pillow spinning
our castle off an island full of quills,

its sandy banks scribbling out epic stanzas,
on which we walk and chat with storks.