Dwarfed By Hard Times Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Throughout the popping
season, muzzles roaring
louder than thunder
slashed into pieces of quivering
lightning, he crawled

amid ants, hid himself
in snail shells in the creeks
and let life swallow him.

As bushes cracked open
with smoky fires and quiet
blazes, his life in a cocoon
rolled from hill to hill,

nights building bunkers
for him across rolling
valleys. Throughout the bong
that molded his ears
into dead bouncing stones

drunk with the quivering rock
swirling above boulders
with stropped broken stones
pinching and biting him,
the song of triggers dug
tunnels through his ears drunk

with sharp cracks and booming
falls of skies, their glass
mass breaking into crystals
of stars that shone nights
with glazed onyx flesh.

(ii)

Then he got lost in the marshes,
sharing bedrooms with
sneaky crocodiles scrubbing
him as he played scaly anteaters,
freezing into stone slabs

they tramped on, scrubbing
him with blades of their scales,
as he winced into logs
of wood and stretchy stones.

In his scaly body clothed
in pangolin scales, he let himself
rolled off by ambling elephants,
which slipped and fell
on him, sinking him deep
down in in marshy sludge.

(iii)

Then he got lost again
amid low hedges and shrubs,
winds and gales,

the only scissors
that trimmed his goatee
and bushy sideburns and beards
that curled into hard nuts.

And when he rose back
to earth's sanctuary of air,
he let birds settle on him,

as he stretched himself out
to sun and moon storms
ignited by his new treeless
homes sprawling for miles.

Dwarfed by hard times,
he rolled over and crept
through mud, clearings
filled with bags of air growing
into his last sanctuary.

(iv)

But coated with clay
and sludge from deep bog,
he wore an inner
heavier coat of prodding prongs,

hands of inner night
folding him up
into rocky wrinkles and barnacles
he carries on his crowded
face pimpled with crusts

of old tears washed off
by rains and splashed streams.
By a babbling stream
he now stands, as I peek at him,
my eyes thundering
at him in his scaly coat of sadness:

Let your courage roast off
the fur and feathers
carried by your fighting face.