Roll Call Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Ball-headed mountain
in your seaweed gown
of shrubs, are you

at your desk of tall trees
stroking your shoulders
of pebble and rock

winds from the sea's
roaring, whistling waves flying
from troughs and peaks

with handkerchiefs
and napkins of misty splashes?

As an ice-clothed puffin
breathes out flames
from the Sahara Desert?

(ii)

The children jam themselves
into the iciest corner
of the house, this playground,

where bird-flown hands
frolic in silos and in the trough
of a whirlpool

sinking with children
wearing ashes and clouds
of lonely birds

trotting within themselves
to flip out a gem of an answer
to a teacher's question

in a sea of hollow faces,
a classroom planted
in an unmulched ridge of parrots

(iii)

pecking into note books
with shivering hands,
stone-floated squiggles
drifting in a river

of arms flowing
to the storm wave's cliff
collapsing over a bridge,

a slab built on dancing beds
slapping back
muttering scribbling children
in a classroom grown
into troughs,

children tossing themselves
out of the depths that ground
and sifted them

into the barbules and downy barbs
of rainbow parrots
perched on mountains

(iv)

in streets carrying
tall Brobdingnagians,
heads too heavy
with light skies of singing birds,

sitting down
to answer a roll call,

as a teacher flies sea-wide flags
on a face, the smile
that drowns children to grow back
into mountains
of air and flickering storms

and the typhoon's hand
breaking down
a blackboard on three legs

and the rolled-over flip chart,
from which birds fly
into a birdy world of mountains.