Tethered To A Bray Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(To Agnes Josiane Bongjoh)

(i)

Spinning here
always
piercing my eyes
with your gaze

and crushing
cruising
smile, keeps
you close to me,

as I press
my cheek on yours,
this pillow
that fondled you
all along through

the hills
and mountains
and valleys
of our
journey to your sleep.

Like the swell
of that pillow
still frothing with spume
on a shore.

(ii)

Storm in the bed,
as you ran a race
faster than me
to the mountain
milepost

on the fleeing horizon
cutting distance
into a fleeting moth

clothed in ashes
of my time-burnt
tinder floating
along the only

whispering birds
on a roof
over a river of drizzles
trickling down
furrows, these dales

I've quietly
mulched
with a misty
fallow land of a face
hit by rainstorms.

(iii)

But I've always
drifted and raced
back to a lace
growing peak,

a ballooning
snowball
swelling into a firestorm
without embers.

Tossing me
back and forth
round a rising
tornado
of me, a bleating

sheep folded up
into its fur,
as a floating
voice-swallowing

flowing dove
lifts me,
tossing me high

into its tall
flowering fruity tree
crowned
with eagle wings,

when onyx
clouds
seize me again,
wrap me up

and tie me
into the knot
of a snowdrop,

the only
flower
that freezes
me up

into a stony
ice block,
the galloping horse
tethered to
its choked bray.