Wounded Red Dusk Sky On Green Earth Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(for mourning Ambazonian women)


(i)

Gray fog sketches and sprays
a piece of red-lipped sky on cold earth.
Are these the cloud-wrapped boys

on parched green lawn
cruised to the end of a pier?
Are these the boys piercing a crater's eye

with spear-head thorns
jumping out of mouths shrieking, as shrikes
rush to an ashy edge of sky?

Have they taken the road
thinning out to a thread, off which
they're flipped over life's cliff?

Have they slipped off the rock
at a tree-tall shoulder, a hill
standing on a tunnel of air to a gorge?

Peonies and red tulip heads
stick out from ballooned abdomens,
as camelia bruises crawl on arms

to bow to large crabs
of mangled flesh swollen to spray
red spiders clipped on thighs.

Ants of slashes on skin creep down
toeing the line on edges of their lanes
to craters of larger wounds,

lakes of blood floating taupe bodies.
Silver and taupe stars
have landed on them to shout back at sun.

(ii)

Lying green carpet of red flowers
creeps beyond a field
to the edges of a staggered bank,

flowering trees raised as bower
for whooping wailing women
scooping out burning candle wax of a flying sky.

Carved-out and mangled young men
hang on hollows of their wounds.
They sit on eroded furrows and ditches

Draining deltas of tears
on these women's cheeks into red rivers
yowling and howling under broken suns.

Bring back my only son. Ferret out
my jewel from the deep gorge
of death, where a bowl simmers.

Stretch out the floor of a gorge
to lie by the side of a sky of death,
crickets the only friends jumping
to chirp with hooting mothers.

(iii)

But sky falls at an angle,
rises to an unmeasured tangent of pain
and builds an upright wall.

Climb, climb O let us climb
the wall of a smart, the hill of a bite
roaring through us

to land our boys back on earth
with the hands of a crane's boom head.
Let them land on the lawn of a lap.