Sand Dunes On My Desk Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

I walk down
a thick carpet
of ground and filtered earth,

a quill of a pen
rolling off squiggles
of spilled flying

sand and brown
lumps of silt
to line a bleached pitch,

a flattened beach
emptied of strides

and gallops
and crawls deserting
broken shells.

(ii)

Drifting waters
touch the floor
of fleeing birds,

leaving no wind-blown
calumet grown
into an old gold rod

of culvert rust
to strengthen clay columns
for claw traces

of the crane
flying off on slanted pedals
with a bamboo-toothed
harp devoured by a gale.

(ii)

A bubbling rainstorm
shuts its mouth
before the strong bundled

and muscled arms
of punching gusts
take over, kicking back
my crawling hands,

as howling fleeing wolves
leave pawfalls
on a beach's ripped page.

My hand loses grip
on an eagle
and quivers off
a gust's touchdown,

dogs swinging handfuls
of sand onto a page
of sand dunes,

as clusters of smudged ink
built a hill
my pen cannot climb.

(iii)

O sand-struck hand, grab
this high-shouldered tree
by a sandstone

to climb the hill
of a verse
glowing with another sand dune.

On the peak
blow the trumpet
of a thunderclap,

as showers
from a leaking pen
soak a poem wet

into a ball
that cannot bounce
on crawling sprawling sand.