The Cairn Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Old man. He sits on his years
like on a cairn:Each stone
the bite from a large creeping rock
in the trench he'd dug to a shore,

where a canoe had taken him
across hardened waves bumping
against his wooden vehicle
and his broken biting burning ribs.

The leopard he'd shot at close range,
when he went out hunting,
for if he'd missed his prey
he would have been the prey.

And his hilly life would have
fallen Into a cloud by a precipice,
where he would have slipped
into a shark's mouth of death.

(ii)

The deep hole at a drifting sea,
where his canoe
came closeto drilling him Into the floor
of a closed water mass,

where he would have been
a barracuda's stone-numb playmate
drinking tons of water

all his unlived life in a mist down
the unending throat of history.

Down the tunnel to a fish,
whose kin had never been caught
in a living fisherman's net.

(iii)

That fish would have stretched out
its tail and fins into a cumulus,
quickly building a tall nimbus blackboard,
from which he would have read:

Always sit on your cairn
and not by it or beneath it, for the cairn
collapses into a pile
of detritus sprayed down a slope,

rolled down a gaping gorge
with hundreds of tombstone slabs,

each slab reading:
"This is how to die without an epitaph".