Bells Of Hollowness Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(for dying Ambazonian mothers and children)


(i)

How the bells of hollowness
flip me up a mountain ridge.
How the gongs of a blown-out
breathless rock push me

to a crater's floor, faulted walls
of my living room, posters
ripping space into ribs weaving
a basket to hold petals
flown by a storm in a night only

darkening beyond the soot
of burnt roofs in a bubbling lake
flushing out fumes and threads
of smoke to glue unstitchable ends?

(ii)

How France plucks rust-coated
strings of a guitar held out to it
by Cameroun, when winds
from flames and a deluge of blood
are not strong enough

for a tambourine losing its voice
to muzzle and flying balls,
and the unwinged bird

screaming with the borderless
whisper of a sigh.
As the moon bleeds into a bleached
morning, a blinding daylight

burning out twinkles of stars
growing too soon to shoot out
light to a road man should follow
in this world - O man
without an inner bowl, as a dead lad

is dragged out of a ditch
and shot for a second death,
an eclipse man watches and still waves
only light feathers with no calamus.

(iii)

The river flows, the river flows.
And man watches a sea bloat
to fill his inner bowl redder than

an erupting volcano flowing
into the street, every foot a glazed boot
from the marsh and bog of death.

How the inner bowl grows
a tree soaring high into a sky's tail
of clouds flipping out

red rain from the ambling elephant
of a cloud of night, this curtain
shading a silver sun bleeding with blood.