Stabbing A Dead Stone Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(based on the true scene of CameroUnian soldiers "killing" a dead man)

After three bubbling,
buzzing and rattling,

smoldering half-men
drag out
from a deep valley,

the sand-strewn
stretched-out stone
of a man,
his breath in ashes
and curly smoke,

a padauk brunette body
dead and frozen
in its maple hardness
lies on earth's floor,

a stretchy sun ebbed off
the smooth ripples
of a sleeping sea.

O thick rod of rock,
soar through air's
stringed staircase
into the Maker's fort,

a breeze of eyes
settled into hibiscus
bells that ring

loud and stridently
into the stinging
mosquito ears
of the volcano-churned men.

(ii)

But none of the men
hear the hymn
flow with strings of a tweet

from a blood-stained
crimson shrike,
their storm-blocked ears
don't catch,

as their wooden hands
muzzle-stab
the dead stone

one, two, three times
to be more dead.

More dead with a thousand
rumbling strikes
only un-sunned
ceilings cannot hear.

The men continue
to strike the lamb
into a bag of soft wool

full and fluffy
like a sun-lit morning's face
filtering through
whispering birdy leaves
behind a shading tree.

(iii)

When feathery flowers
blow into flutes
in the breaking wind,

strike not a wool-filled
stone, when the Maker
peeks at the cloud
with bones in His eyes.

The far-flung mother
of the stone trumpets out
the cuts and wounds
of her deepening

inner bowl overflowing
into a silver stream
burning her crawling cheeks,

as her face grows
too heavy to be carried
by her drifting shoulders.

And when she shifts
to the sunny shade
of a tulip tree,

her streams of tears
sprinkle feathers
in a gale hardening

into gobs of red-petalled
clotted blood landing
with the fire of red butterflies
splashed on a flower of earth.