Flowers Of Pain Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Are these palisades
of red shrubs
encircling a bush of pansies

and primroses flung back
at them like red stars
to let them see how colorful pain can be?

The gaudy coals sprayed
from neck to hips
glow, sipping every nerve,

leaving them rags
in shreds of themselves -

shrunken leaves
and stamens
hanging from stalks of men
with little steam.

After the tall stalks of grass,
pines raise their heads
and stare the men in the eyes.

Walls of our pain
rise in squiggles
on a foggy screen
of thick clouds, bush rosy thorns
in the clouds running across

like an angled and curved
script with little horns
they cannot decipher.

(ii)

The tall creeping grass rises
to their necks, leaving
red creeping petals
on their shoulders to sink pins.

Their scraped skin grows
red periwinkles of bruises
crawling with claws
all over them as they hammer in
giant ants' whistling sting.

How flowered and dressed
in tight crocheted red gowns
burning them with sun's hot
and breezy mouth,

scratching and pricking them
with baked hands landing
like a red charcoal spray
fed by a blacksmith's bellows.

(iii)

Their bruises toss on them
sun-glazed red gowns
of their own embroidered wounds,

a new weapon that sends
chills and needles -

and the sharp teeth
of knives stropped by chisels
of the will to fight back -

through the flayed nerves
of an enemy,

burning bushes laid down
to roll on their ashes.