Lurking Shadows Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Flames of sunflowers
float through window panes.
They warm me up.

Leaving their fire
and gold shadows
in this walking barrel of a man,

I, a shadow
on a mantis's scribbled legs
walking like doodles

down a white pad
scrubbed by wind-driven
crab claws of a hand
on beach sand,

a page from afterthoughts
of creeping sorrows
growing into a cobra, head held high,

for the strike
that will burn me out.

(ii)

I, carrying sacks of shadows
weighing me down,

pushing me with heavy logs
of iroko and mahogany
bunched hands
punching
my crackling splitting shoulders,

as I stand on a tall mountain
of me. Carrying
more shadows lurking
in mice holes.

Enough now, these shadows
tiptoeing my steps,
as I sip and bite off

the hot head of an ice cream,
this avalanche to sink
through my narrow throat.

And grow into a bonfire
of sun burning off all other
shadows popping up

like files of soldier ants
in stretched-out strings
to tighten
their grip on my pain.

(iii)

Out in a garden of sun,
the gold-rayed crown oozes
with more piercing light

splaying me to peek at the crater
of the shadowy sorrows
burning me from a pit:

O Boyo and Baingo mountains,
their torsos
torn by silver wires of trickling streams,
these hard threads

that can no longer stitch an open
burning wound, Mbingo Hospital
that was devoured
and spat out as warm ashes,

the only gray fleece blanket
covering me,
as I quiver under shadows of pain,

my wall of cemented,
steel-rodded and framed stoicism
collapsing on me

in the shadow
of a colonnade
by a bouncing swelling river,

into which silvery
streams of pain are poured
to bubble
in my tight-lipped cauldron.