White Sheep In White Fog Poem by Felix Bongjoh

White sheep in white fog

From the hill of heroic tombs
One sees mystified
Patches of landscape in foams.
The barren white field
With smoky clouds lays out
A whitish sky on earth:
White unfolding white unfolding white.

The shepherd's white cloak
Wriggles - not in his scruffy gown,
Nor does the fog drift in masses of rags
Unfolding and refolding themselves -
But in the blankness of his bareness.

But Gopti's blunt refusal
To come out of his blank mind -
That white robe
On the blank body of a tale
With no anchor, no hook-
Persists like a lazy cloud in a blue sky
When rain is just a fairy tale.

Holding tight in place
A habit in mushrooms
Rooted like an ancient rock.

In mists of a clue diminished into
Fading traces of milled dust
In faint smoke,
He never changes his mind,

That stiff unmalleable iron
Already lost in a deep naked cave
Of sterile emptiness, a wisdom hammered
Into his spirit with deep nails.

How many times has he died
Choked in his own narrow throat of ideas
With no more morsels to feed
His starved mind in ashes
Of weevilled dust pulverized into foul air?

The creeping foams of a morning drift
In wind-shifts up the hills -
The slope of a tale he has never climbed -
Keeps him climbing up to these fields where fog
Ever sits and stands and stoops.

When static beliefs drain the mind
Of all its serum of thought
And there are no more nerves to find
New pastures, the old shepherd
No longer sees white sheep drifting like white foams
Across hills losing height and sight:
Fog and foam and sheep are the same.

So that morning, a heavy fog
Poured down in a thick engulfing cloak.
And after a ceremony hooding
Trees and tall hillocks with a white veil,
After that ceremony was over
Like the concluded blessing of a priest's aspergillum,
After that piercing sun had melted every hat
On every height dwarfing tall grass,

After all fog was gone with the foams
Of drifting grazing white sheep
Melted into bare green hills,
Never again was Gopti able to feed his hopes,
As he never came out of his cave,
His sheep having vanished into green hands -
Flourishing in nature's deep shades

Where catechists had long preached
On a green vegetal cover
The standing honesty of stones
Never opening their mouths
But witness to all foul play hanging on conscience
Like a persistent fog prey to a mind's myopia.