(for mangled Ambazonian children and mothers)
(i)
Wind brushing off a rockhead
of folks twisted to see
the glow of their splayed flesh,
their calves and soles laid out
before them by the waved
stropped knife of a buzzing storm,
O folks pecked by a red-lipped
eagle fleeing behind a scampering squirrel.
Stabbed stones of men
lying behind a mountain
of their shadows
stretched to a missing sun,
a one-eyed moon lurking
behind children
who've abandoned their bodies
to arcs of two-eyed suns…
(ii)
O mangled fledglings
still to grow life's wings…
Are you taking a break
by the bridge of life
you couldn't cross to a land
only you couldn't see
with closed eyes sealed
by an endless trench
of night from Sirius corridor?
Hairs in the silent wind,
their squiggles of bodies
flown across a river of love
flowing like lawn-dried linen
pulled by gusts
from the mouths of babies
who could not whimper
on a bed that cut us off.
(iii)
O river of waters from drools
splashed and sprinkled
down cheeks far flung above a sun
baking a red river in stitches.
Growing more red under
a banyan tree by waters screaming
quietly to the waterfalls
building a bed of silt
with no mattress to hug babies
one more time O waters
jumping with a wild horse's strides
when a red sky collapses
on a land of spun poppies,
flowers shedding off
scars from sleeping hearths,
coals in the mouth of a volcano.
They lie behind the bobbing
amaryllis of sealing its leaking lips
over the screaming bones,
mothers clinging to hydrangea
from folks in dark headscarves
blending with a night
of rolling interwoven caves of men
powdered with an eclipse's soot.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem