Old Widower Amid Pigeons Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Whistles blow amid stitched
voices of far-flung screaming children
breathing in voices
of yelping dogs by loud whispering trees.

Weaving swinging hands
and flipped-off fingers
of light-splayed playing children
into air's flying balloons.

Pulling them to lighter strings,
an elastic life taking over
stiff rods and pegs
planted by elders reigning them in
with blinking and trumpeting eyes.

Bells ring in children's songs
trailing the rustle
and clutter of dry cracking leaves
after the rattle and warble
on arm-stretched roofs,

shooting rains catapulted
by graphite forests
of clouds in half-nights.

(ii)

Charcoal clouds dressed in beige
shirts floating over
cotton and lace pants and shorts
of skipping bobbing clouds

take over cream gaps.
Bleaching themselves into white
seas of skies flooding
and erasing dark patches of clouds.

But a balloon of daylight
bounces in to take a seat
in the middle of an old man's yard,

where lights from teeth
of warbling children ooze out
with sharp-lipped daylight,

as more children's ring
and cut a thick glassy air
into shards of sound sprinkled
to rise as stars in the expanding daylight.

(iii)

Chasms in the rolling air
and floor of an old man
give him wiggles,

as scratches and itches trail ants
of a straying moment
building an anthill tall faint voices,
his memory shooting arrows again.

Gray and white gaps
surround him, as he misses
croaking pigeons
by frogs hiding in the marshes

of a star-lit night of daylight swell
into a splashed moon
of pulling and pushing beams of sun.

The spraying moon of day flips
over its shadow

and touches down on a full-bodied
bright evening swinging
into a mid-morning's spray
of sun in its fanned hearth,

as daylight still spreads the wings
of a thousand flying egrets
perched on white ambling cows
trailing shepherds in white boubous.