Laughing Dove Poem by Felix Bongjoh

i)

Pops of a blazing fire scream through quiet air.
With the undulating, wind they're shredded to a breeze.

Roll your tongue and drop it off into the tunnel
of your throat deepening its trench
to the broad-collared tree, its green leaves

spinning a beaming infant's exercise book
full of the green grass specks and blue rods adding up
to a bundled sum, a tiny bunch of reeds.

A voice digs deep into the gardens on balconies, fibers
of light stitched to rolling vines on lawns.

They build a nest for mutters rolled off like stone balls
dropping on glass floors stretched out to a wave's lips.
Your groans and mutters dressed in laughs
fly off of a hidden bleeding smirk from an over-preened face.
Are you the monk-priest Martin Luther

did not to whip, the flower a chaste-frocked torso
is yet to pick in a garden of his
bathing in breeze and sun of an ocean breeze?

Mutter and laugh off with air stroking air
and palmate leaves clapping hands through gusts,
as they rip off sky's floating taupe shirt.

Groan out your low mumble, when lions fly
through the brown wind, their tawny manes
blending cotton uniforms with spirals of rising dust,

as pink and magenta flowers grow
from the loud sky of a thunder-pulled voice,
a baby's spread and sprayed laugh
blowing flames to swoosh out California's summer fires
and the wildfires of a harmattan bush.

(ii)

It's not yet time for those piano-lipped bells
you hear from a horizon-dressed bird,

a jet black cloud still hanging over a breaking slope,
the crater, where logs of folks sleep,
face down, stitched to earth's roots.

They're woven to earth's crust too
but still fly with the birds poking sky's ceiling
breathing in whiffed-out stars from walls of rays.

Tell your far-flung friend kookaburra
over the oceans
these bank-punching heavy-trunked waves
thundering drums on leathered hills

and skidding wriggling ocean swells
to branches fall from a ceiling.

They raise snowy walls and towers
from a singing baby's tongue
basking in the flying stars of its milk teeth.

(iii)

Between life and death, a fire ginger
flips out its worm-long tongue to crawl
with red lightning on flesh.

How is wounded eroded earth
dressed to stifle a red stream from the corners
of a baby's mouth
bleeding with a laughing flower,

as a hand drops with a bandage,
night's frown already settled
on ash and caves and deep pits
of cold charcoal, the hearth swelling into a desert?