Old Man By A Breeze Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(based on a trip to visit the oldest tortoise in La Digue, Seychelles)

(i)

Flanked by whispering
thin-waist, torch-eyed

pines and shrubby
elastic-necked
winged rising plants
and waving pinnate leaves,

I mumble back
to a zephyr
from sky-poking bamboos
and high-shouldered trees
singing old songs

in whirring and whizzing
breezes amid low guitar strings
of warblers on perched angles.

And whispering magpie-robins
listening to cracks
and wide windows
in the stretched voices

of fellow birds, from whom
they steal the warmth.
And scratch off reeds and grasses
melting into their claws.

(ii)

All the trees beam
and breathe out specks
and feathered speckles

of dry scars from their trunks
flipping out green
and gold ribbons of leaves

hovering over
scolopendromorph
centipedes

spelling out buried centuries
crowned by silence
and goateed
and bearded solitude

dragging themselves beneath
swifts cruising to holes
in air's sagging valleys housing
widening hollows

along hidden straits
of a slow, slug-piloted life.
.
(iii)

I walk down a stretch
of unclothed pebbles.

And clothe unfeathered
and unfurred air
with rolling whistles
from my dry mouth

rising with tones of a clarinet
to poke a sky's tail
shooing off birds
from an old world
cloudy in my inner bowl of a sky
I must soar to

by penetrating the core
of age until I fall
on an old man dressed
in a thick latticed leather.

Flow, flow, carry me back
to an old cave,

a man lighting up
the world
with stone and sparks
flying from my eyes to land
on a veteran of veterans,

this tortoise sticking out
a ropy neck, the world
can only peep at,

as he drags back
his treasured head
into his armored quiet body
full of breeze,
as he waits for paced time
to tick and ring along.