Dinosaur Of Silence Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Mid-afternoon rang
bells and clinked,
chains of low-voiced
banjos brushed

and stifled to sealed
lips and sent
flying in hot drifting winds

often tuned down
to pluck heavier
mumbling guitars
in silent floating
mantis-legged breezes.

It drummed gongs,
a clinking sun's face
turning a leathered
shimmering gong and bong

spitting out stropped
and flattened-out rays
of sun still unfolding

its yarn of feathery
cream wool
poured in funneled
doses of rays from a glassy ball.

(ii)

Dressed in a loin cloth
and headgeared,
a hill of fabric woven
to stand on her head,

grabbing her tight
above her temple,
Nawain Nyeah
tapped Nawain Nafoyn,

a loud valediction,
as she flew across
the hills to the cornfield.

The braided weedy,
bushy expanse curved
her all day
to the hollows and bumps

of a field she tilled,
weeding off
chunks of grasses

from their glued roots
sticking with crab fingers

to earth in the lips
of grasshoppers
and crickets cutting air
with sharp voices,

loudly commanded
by twittering passerines.

(iii)

In her closed-in dome
of stalks and leaves
hanging over her all day,

she dug and scooped
out undergrowth
with tortoise-back hands,
her fingers grown
into gorilla claws -

turned stronger prongs
of a garden spading fork -

until columns of green
ridges bloomed
only with stalks,
low and creeping weeds melting
into a taupe layer of earth.

No leaf hanging over her,
as she stood up
dressed in an airy gown
of staggered silence,

she muttered it was time
to go home.

(iv)

She coughed off
a piece of silent stone-filled
silence
dressed in cave,

the widening fangs
of a snake of silence still

pulling out
its arrow-pointed tail
from a deep narrow hole

and shouted out
across the valley
"Nawain Finkuin".

(v)

A voice shouted
back twice, jumping
down her ears
and shredded cold chest:

"Nawain Finkuin, Nawain
Finkuin", as she packed up
hoe and machete

into her raffia-woven
basket already heavy
with a piece of darkening dusk.

She paced herself up
to a horse gallop
and quickly to a flying giraffe

running through
the shrubby tottering bush,
a stone in the deep
freezer of a fright,

as she vowed she'd been
hugged by a dinosaur
blowing thousands of horns.