Dark Tree Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(drawn from a scene of layered tires burnt by a mob)

(i)

Seeds of loud voices
grow glowers and pouts
pouring out garble
and all shades of moue

to overflow the banks
of a stammering river
of mumbles, moans and gripe.

The dark hill of a tree
is growing,
branches arching over,
twigs of smoke swaying,
leaves of graphite
smoke falling off,

cartwheeled over
to the thickened dark
rolling carpet
of floating drifting earth,

as dark smoke careens
across lawns and hedges
and over culverts
of fleeing men
lying over deeper ditches.

(ii)

How do you plant
a tree of pain
to grow with threads
and fibers,

black birds flapping
wings of cinder
trailing a swirl of jade
and pitch clouds?

Rising in thick hairy
and feathery curls
and soaring, hovering coils,

a smoky spray
of dark, brown gray
swinging
clusters of black leaves
in a tornado of fumes?

The dark tree, sure,
is growing to poke sky.
It devours sun, all its
flashlights melting,
leaving
only smog and haze.

(iii)

Perched on an umber
hickory sky hiding onyx birds
still dressing up
in the feathers
of red-winged grackles,

birds trot and totter
on air's gliding floor.

Black birds, black birds
rising with puffs
and running stretchy winds,
grackles, crows
flapping

and ravens flying out
of thick dark rolling smoke,
as wheels burst out
of wheeled cruising fumes.

And when haze
and lumps of smog drift aside,
the dark tree
is seen to be hanging
on its roots still sinking deep

into the red
and gold seeds of flames
that planted
the dark tree of fumes

to flash and fly out
with the blackest
wing-flapping birds.