More Than A Twill Weave Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

When shredded clouds gathered
and filled the open cornfield of a room,
with clouds swallowing corncrakes
and laughing cobs in fires of sunlight,

you grew into sky with its voices
of starry birds and low drum
of departing chopped-off thunder
and hum of trees in a breeze.

You were a crowd of clustered
company interwoven, arm in arm,
curved-out elbow the pillar
and pillow for a leaning neighbor,

every dent and peaked mountain
of a galloping, undulating smile
the geography that planted every tree
of your silhouette to fly its branches

on an audience's face, every pull
and push and wind-driven spin,
the tic that spun everyone
to look into the glazed mirror of you,

glassy spring water etching out
the smallest tadpole of a grin
in the bowl's hole beneath the ripple
of an effaced frown melting
into the bud of a baking exploded laugh.
.(ii)

You were the hunter diving into
every angle of the forest
of furnished walls and shrubby floors,

a hall of couches and tables
growing like trees and bushy stems,
from which you often found
pollen for a proliferating banter

that warmed up space
colder than a December night
in the center of the Sahara Desert.

Wrapped in the light clouds
of your flowery dreamy world,
a thunderclap at the windy door
switched you back

into the motion of a bumble bee,
sipping silvery drops of nectar
from bobbing flowers of sleeping chats,
which you nudged awake with a giggle.

(iii)

When family hung on the floating
threads of a plain weave,
you threw in an elastic filament
that made the tapestry,

on which everyone rose
to their feet, flipping hands across
the center table, a bouquet

the tree from which picked fruits,
until a conversation's tree was trimmed
into dry brittle twigs
and shredded fallen withered leaves.

In the striped and checkered weaves
of your shirts and blouses,

we harvested the most corn cobs
in an airstrip of a living room,
an aircraft bound to take off

with passengers glittering
in the satin weave
of prattles that rolled with stroking waves
to a shore of beaming candle-lit faces.