Why? Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

From the flame and wildfire
of a crater bouncing back
from the snowball

of a cream bird, head tugged in armpit,
do we not rise the tree branch
on the spilling gold of a volcano?

Are we not created equal
from a plenum of earth
as light as a feather
and as heavy as an elephant's bulk
sitting on its stumpy tail?

Because on the beach
of Avatar's creation by hills
and mountains

rolling over their own shadows
to the beginning
of the end of the new born,

the world trotted on a horse
from shore to shore
spinning only where a spring
spurted, spilling waters

to furnaces cooking clay
under our feet
standing on our unborn bones?

As babies in nests unhatched
nobody knew where
and how life began; nobody
knew of what clay
they were to be made,

sculpted out of sky and air.
Sculpted out of the mist
from a breaking fog
that braided themselves to a cloud.

(ii)

Nobody was etched out
of a rolling stone in a typhoon.
Everybody found the pebble
rolling themselves
out of cotton and afterfeather breeze.

Nobody sprang out
from a banyan tree trunk,
nor the baobab tree,

which stands on its own crown
of roots and limbs flipped
out to sky and dye of the cloud
that dances to brew rain.

(iii)

When a bout of cloudiness
and storm is over
by the edge of a falls' cascades
and ladders of water
showered down destiny's path
to a wrinkled desert,

the babble of a stream spills
the slab, on which we both stand,

as a desert storm spits out dust,
on which we climb,
only to fall into a deluge,
from which we bathe our tears.

Why, do we not drink
our sorrows from a common bowl,
in which we bathe,
pimpled rocks

and smooth pebbles of regret,
the plenum in a bowl
that spins and pedals us?