Gratitude To The Bees Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

The wild thunderous roar shuts
its mouth and door to its throat
behind us, the buzzing bees

stitching voice to the bubbling hemstitch
of soft-landing waves, rolling slowly on sand.

The bees have armored themselves
with softly rattled bass drums, their
wings tapped gently to give volume
to their breezy voices of stems hissing

in a dry hot flowing and tumbling wind
having stretched out their hum
to piping and tooting queendoms,

the place those lions in broken claws
and chopped-off paws, sinking
them deep beneath their manes,

curl away from, as the gonging
flowers, ovals and dots of stretching bees
tie up the big animals' limbs and necks,

stinging softly until fire
and stroking flames devour them,
melt them into wax,
as they swim and drown in rivers of sleep.

(ii)

We walk on narrow tracks
flanked by agrimony, to which
we softy toss back
threads of plasmatic drifts,

flying cotton specks and flowered
butterfly wings of gratitude.

Cream and beige flying air
whispers with bowing leaves
towards shrubs of flowers

take us to rays of light on a sea shore
still putting on its gown of gold,

large umbrellas of white latticed clouds
floating over us like glassy singlets.

How sky closes in its net of white nylon
weaving an edge of glossy,
flashy polyester
to float over us like a film of Venus.

(iii)

We walk on pebbled track down a bush
of uncertainty, grasses strangling
each other with green threads and ropy fingers.

The wind buzzes and hums again
with the bees that hanged roaring lions
to tree of buzzes bloating the air,
as the buzzes sink into their underground nests.

Buzzing bees of wind and gale drag
them through dwarf walls of allium, leaves
and balls of patience stroking them.

We bow to the agrimony that towed us
here through dens of lions,
bushes growing tall tufts of manes.