Walls Of Silence Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

All men were walls, one man
a shrubby wall dwarfed
by his tree flowerless height,

no singing fruit hanging
down from the stiff branches

of his patrol-and-strike-black-man
uniform sitting on his body
like pasted pads and slabs of snow.

Spraying on him the beaming
color of a milky sky
stitched and woven out of threads
from the close-knit
plate of a ceiling serving only cold

butted knees on a neck
from the overheated cauldron
of the world, where he bubbled,

his colleagues sturdy standing pillars
of ice that won't melt
into a silvery river of love

flowing down the rocky face of a man
grown hilly and bumpy.

(ii)

The shrubby man was a walking stalk
planted firm to cling to roots
held down to the ground by claws

and barbed stiff hooks of prejudice,
his pliable booty knee
the stone-mouthed hammer

that landed on a victim's drum neck,
hit and knee-tapped
like a festive tom-tom.

The other men stood stiff
deeply planted in their rooted walls
enveloped and barricaded
within their palisades of silence.

Threads of silence were flung across
the air by eyes breathing out
mist and fog from walls built of ice
to knit and weave a fabric of stone.