Hammer Nails In A Carpenter Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

The carpenter
chisels out
a piece of wood
from a lumberjack's
rattling sawmill

for a patched
wooden box
standing
taller than the animal
it will harbor.

He fits it
with aclick
on his high
anvil
and hammers it down

to drive in
and firm up the nails
on the cage-box.

What cage-box
flies
without wings
throttles
without motor,

into a landing strip
built
into a fort

to swallows man
into bowels
of powder and dust.

(ii)

Hammer, how many
punches
and jabs have you
landed on
screaming nails,

as ashy birds
in their tree nests
whimper and whistle
to each other

to await dark clouds
to fall on them,
wrappingthem up
into dusk's red specks

and bleeding cuts
of cream silver air,
when hour
no longer rides hour
into a grave,

but onto a witness
standing box
before a judge
using
his wooden hammer
of a round-headed gavel

with little steam
in its brain,
as it hammers down
a carpenter

into a deep grave,
a light-year
stretched
song of a hammer
to fall with cutting axe
heavier than a noose.

(iii)

O life to burn
behind a latticed
grill to swallow him

into death's bowels
for chopping off

a customer'spocket
full of flying
birds to bring back

reeds and petals
of money basking
in sunny banks
warming up carpenters'

inner bowls
as they swell up
space for hammers
flying in

not to drive in nails
on a box,
but a carpenter's life
into a cubbyhole.