Crowns Of Grief Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(requiem for a beloved daughter)

(i)

The world fell on you
like sky glass woven out of
yarns, the only fruits
picked from branches of a tree
I could not climb.

The world too fell on me
with spiky branches
still sweeping off rusty needles
from wounds that don't heal

in a crater's mouth of pain
with no voice, no song
from a sun-clothed canary
weaving crucifying crowns

from the deep barrel of earth,
everything ending
in a cloud carrying clouds of dust.

(ii)

I grow out of the cornfield
spraying spiders' hands
and needle fingers
from an umbrella thorn acacia,

flipping out thorns
from a trunk of pain
grown from crawling leaves
glued to petioles
digging holes into an ashy skin,

the breaking stem of my sob
crane-lifted to pieces of me falling back
in a fluted wind.
In a gonged cough.

In muzzle-popped sneezes
trailing feathers,
my breath crawling like worms without tails.

Without heads to pull me back
into a long trail of light
to scoop out my lost path in a tentacled
lace of filaments spilling labyrinths
from a creeping stem.

(iii)

The stem is weevilled.
The stem buzzes with bees stinging
with a pus of nectar
and the burring pause of a cat
licking off pins in bones,

mouths of my skin regurgitating
chipped-off nail heads
spinning the rotors
of an engine long wrecked in a deluge

swelling the mighty river
from my heart torn into tributaries
only flowing back through my pipes
and tunnels of pain.

Burning and burning
in flames sprayed and fanned
by the bowels of a cave
stitching and weaving night
out of night,

scooping out rolling coals
to build walls of flames
clothing my spine in bleached ashes.

Clothing my chest
with a latticed singlet of memory
floating on my torso,
as I walk through wild bearded lanky stems
in forests of myself,

entangling undergrowth
the only shoes I wear to stand
on the mouth of earth covered with reeds
and grasses planted by night.

(iv)

What night thickens flannels
of night beneath hangers on my brows
swaying with pain,
its linen extending on a chord
stretched by poles of storm.

What crow pads thicken
the black wool from a lamb
that never bleated
but paused in galloping showers of rain.

I'll weave myself back
from a breadth of hair, its length
growing a river, from which
I cannot swim to banks of myself.