Where's The Sun? Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(for dying Ambazonian children and mothers)


(i)

Behind the hills,
Broad-shouldered
Bamboos rise

And skip across
Like fleeing giraffes
From chasing
growling galloping feasts.

And tall trees
And rolling jumping mountains
Wave only smoky
And foggy hands.

I see not even
A candlelight, onyx
Stretched-out sheets
And screens

Of a shifting night
Glued to itself
Still hanging everywhere.

Darkness brews spider
Rags of beasts to crawl
And lurch through
Bedsides of hiding mothers

And children cut off
From sun in the thick bushes.

A pitch night spraying
Dark blindness, carves out
Caves of a blanketed
But swinging obsidian
And slate-feathered night

Not even a star
Can dig out
A path of rays through.

As it flies down
To flash light
For fleeing whimpering
And wincing children
Caught in a dead-end
Of darkness opening a door

To a chamber harboring
A roaring lion
Whisking its smoky tail,
As it licks blood off its mouth.

(ii)

Sun, hiding your face
Above layers of dark drifting
Clouds. O sun stretching
Out hands I cannot
Draw closer to a fallen tree
Of cheeping clucking chicks.

O sun, jump down
From a sky
Still climbing laggers
To pull out feathers
And afterfeathers
Of your rays
We're pulling with an orison

To pull out mother
And fear-mangled children
From a deep dark hole
Full of fumes and smoke
From burnt-down hay.

And choking reeds
No longer standing to chant
The wind-driven song

Into the ears
Of a thousand Stars
Carried by flashlights
Pointed
And waved by dwarfs,

Their voices still
Too low to be heard across
Walls of a bloating night
Behind a twill

And plain weave
Of night
Hiding a sun's tail
Only wiping off sleeping eyes

Now seeing sprawling
Bouncing bones
That balloon through

Rays still flailing
Grains of darkness
Off a tall cob of night

Still filtering rays
Of a tottering,
But head-lifting day.