Front And Back Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(to an Ambazonian prisoner dead in prison)

(i)

In an evening glow,
face the half-crown sun
shining a dry twig
of withered branches

drooping from a trunk
gripped by no roots,

flesh having lost
all ribbons of the green leaves
that sang softly to him

and nursed birds
to whisper and mutter love
into his mangled ears
drifting into a darkened nimbus

under a thick-crowned tree
of himself, a stemmy stalk
as he kept on growing

and crowing himself out
of a sinking gorge
in the nook of his pain,

as his ribs dropped off
to wobble and hang
on the sketched wingspan
of flying clavicles,

these etched bows
with no whetted arrows

to toss off cruising wings
on still feathers

into the sky of a man
with no sun -

not even a butterfly patch,
a shredded star
sailing off to sink in its hole

on the parched clay
of a thick stone-bodied sky
in waves of heat
from a hearth's mouths of wasps

pinching off all gloss
from the smooth strings that tied
him to his family
that would never stroke.

(ii)

On night's moonlit back,
two ridges of mountains
sit where scapula
once stood stretching out
round stones of fists.

Now the two mountains
have sunk deep furrows

into an undulating
piece of boggy land
sunk further by a lack of clay

to fill up furrows
with sun-molded flesh
gleaming with arms
that held out in the gripping
hippo tusks of looped

and reef knot-tightened times
that squeezed him
out of his ribs and left him

on brittle pegs, these legs
that could not make the stride
of a snail at one go,

as a sooty curtain of night
fell behind the glass
screen of a life in shards,

a broken vase of a man
his tree-branched family
would no longer fondle
with lips of a wallowing breeze,

as he has rolled off
the mountains of his scapula
into a deep gorge
melting life's journey
into a rooted stone wall.