Going Home Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

The young men and women
stood like wingless
birds in nests of their hiding places
perched and sky-hurled

into deep air holes
on heavy branch-basket
and leaf-woven trees.

They whined with mosquitoes
and hissed with the snakes,
hiss-whispering among themselves.

For they froze into slates of air -
not to be smelled.
Not to be piped or smoked out

by those brunette and tortilla
burly dudes
floating in their itchy uniforms.

(ii)

The hiding men and women
were leaves in the wind
and branches of themselves,

withered by hour-minutes
of waiting,
as they melted out of themselves

and hardened into the pebbles,
on which they stood and walked.

They stood on their abdomens
in the bushes, many pairs
of legs growing from their navels,

as they were clung to gears
to scamper off
on four, six, eight
and ten legs even as bipeds.

(iii)

Nestling in corners
of crawling sighing grass
in bird nests in the bushes,

they threw glances - arrows hurled
from their pupils -
at every yellow,

blush and blonde flames
and sparks, slashing

and chewing and devouring
their houses
into intestines and bags
filled with cinders
and smoky gray clouds.

Trailing them, as they crawled
off without a road to spidery
labyrinths,

through which they slithered
across croaking marshes
on feathery mats and carpets of grass.

(iv)

Rolled over a muttering stream,
they blind-stitched
and back-stitched themselves

through elephant grass stems
and raffia palm trees,

where they fly-stitched themselves
across their arched thorny branches

scratching them, needling them
in emerald and hickory clouds
of interwoven braided leaves,
their new fort.

(iii)

Where is home,
when birds trot
and crawl and toboggan,

their wings
chewed into gray dust

and smoke as thick
as their skin
and dreadlocks of dusk?

Where is home,
when chickens cluck in mist
in a bleating wind,

as they grow into stray dragons
growling for a nest,
where lions and leopards growl?

In the beige and tan haze
darted smirks and scorpion grins
crawl across their faces

and die, slashed
by the lightning strike of sun.