Farm In Wilderness Poem by Felix Bongjoh

Pounce forward into a hazy wilderness,
Where green farms are yet to bloom
From stretched deserts and sandy rock,
From coarse pebbles deep beneath the earth.
Sand grains talk, lips cracked, bleeding.

Dive onward into hairless, scarred space,
Through bowed, prostated hills, kneeling,
To passing pilgrims, through tense clasts
On limestones: tramp to thirsty, skinny hordes,
Fields all scorched and torched, creeping.

Leap forward on featherless mats,
On earth skin hot as kiln and kin
Quietly baking tired soles - scaly
With a dazed monotony, repeated steps
Burnt, dented by each stride in ashes.

(ii)

Seedless, the wombless farmer in
A swoon, drills into sand to scoop out
Clay yielding only chapped leaves.
Meatless, the hunter's inch-long sight
Has no arrows until he stoops to prowl.

When the farmer becomes a camel
In an endless stretch of desert, all drained
Out into sands and drunken crowds of sand,
His road soon joins moist footprints
To loam and a worm-spilled, bathing jungle.

(iii)

Short the fisherman's hands, his net
Unable to roam and sneak and hook,
His paddles dark-fed strokes, following
No tide, gallivanting on shallow waters
Until he feeds drive into his instincts.

Until hands wave-driven, thoughts
As slippery as fish in moon-lit seas,
Sight, the only sea-scavenging bullet,
And low whistled songs, become captains
Of troops through sneaky waves.

(iv)

Down in your yard in the open desert
Of your own sandy drive with no heart,
Not even the peyote cactus thrives.
Only a water-guzzling eucalyptus grows,
O rock-trunk soaring into the skies!

Rock be the hunter's sharp muzzle,
The fisherman's tentacled net-hook,
The farmer's long-handed hoe sinking
Into every earth with honed needles:
Will, marsh in wilderness and desert!