I Seize Your Hand Poem by Felix Bongjoh

I Seize your Hand
(i)

I seize your hand drifted
back into light,
a star shredded into itself,
a glassy butterfly
trailing the sunk-in sky

splashing more light out
of the cloud I dwell in,
a daub of mud in the throat
of a tube that's no hose.

The deep ravine digs
itself out of barrels of sludge.
O sinking pit of me.

Stretched out into a river
from a stream of salty water.

My body is wet
with hole-tossed worms, bait
for streams flying off my breath
to perch on a chest of floods,

this reservoir churning
laky spirals
of water that cannot cleanse me.

(ii)

O flow softly through
the ashy skin of the land
I'm molded with to tramp on.

I wear wooden feet
I rise with stone-soled boots

to shred my shadows
into files of ants
whipping me
into my thin palm lines,
from which fibers crawl.

I seize your hand
in thickening fibers
creeping
with hairs my head cannot wear
without clean palms.

On my palm not a blister,
but a swamp
with old pastes of a handshake
that slipped off

an eagle's wing, that clap
with your hand
that rolled off thunder's mouth,
leaving a crater
to listen to its rumbling drums.