Red And Black Poppy Flower Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

The shirts are red, the blouses
dipped in red dust too.

Undergarments stick out
grasses and hills of red linen
to spill and fly from a basket.

What oozing lava drips
from a crater's rolling mouth
roaring, as it swallows more
filthy linen into the rumbling
animal of a machine

spitting out cobwebs
of a dress stretched out
to fibers overflowing sleeves
sitting in a thick nimbus.

Or are these red flames chewing
up a flower's hard stalk
to spit out an eclipse, a heavy

night cloaked in a widow's
black frock croaking
like a frog wearing a bleeding
smudge of a cobblestone.

(ii)

It stretches into fingers
of a headless rag, a spider's
limbs from a dusty basket
of crumpled laundry

bunched like dry sticky leaves
packed by a storm
rolling on a zephyr's punctured wheels.

It's all crusty laundry
surging like a sea's dust-laden wave,

a taupe darkening flannel
itching to be soaked
and squeezed out
of its thick unseamed cloud.

(iii)

What large umbrella of a flower,
its hat the curved reeds
of a soft-climbing flat-peaked roof
sitting on the herdsman's hut

dwarfed into the stunted shrub
of a creeping small house
wearing a short blouse of door blinds
flipping out bustard wings.

A flower sits in the black
vase of a night standing
on broken bricks piled up into a hill,

no polished planted rocks
and cobblestones for steps,

but the smooth banana tree bark
flipping over hands to cartwheel
with a piece of red coal
from a crater's popping mouth.