Departing Train Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

The train is hooting
just fifty standing
electric poles off behind

lanky chirping grasses
bowing for a salute,

when whispering moments flow
under lengthening itchy brows
on bumpy faces hilly
with rising climbing moments

as hugs and clasped hands
stroke and wriggle on chests
and sinking cheeks.

And stretch out on the station,
heavy knotted lumps
on heavy ropes and light strings
that cannot break,

when throbbing shoulders
hook themselves
into warm reef knots
never to be broken across
widening rivers,

whose shores drift ever apart
as time ticks
towards rocks behind far-flung hills.

(ii)

Cleaving distance to widen
stretchy proximity,
as glued scrubbing hands
float on parched backs

with brittle spines no longer
holding faces
overrun by these rivers

and their ten-fingered splashes
streaming down
windy and stormy cheeks

talking to each other
louder than a gale
riding through an orchard,

from which tightly clutched couples
pick only the fruit
of departure, as pulling hands

shout out "stay planted"
like nestling finches rubbing feathers.

(iii)

Over the rails a deluge
of moments dropping in cascades,

water splashes stick like goo
on broken cheeks too brittle

to hold fast-flowing brooks
on bumpy stony faces
planting more stones

between fast-flowing
currents that slip and bounce off
on a one-way trip,

as the stiffening silent stones
rise in their stillness
and stand like knights.

(iv)

River, river, you scurry off
on cheeks of earth

like stretched-out files
of squirrels
scampering, as they float
on wheeled claws.

You're gone. I stay planted.
And rooted within me,

dry wood shedding
my scaly bark
to the hurled hurricane
of a catapulted come-back,

your storm-stretched trip
ending on silt, the train
chuckling to a stop
in a cloud's rumbling tornado:

O departing river flowing
without me,
that half of me in the tide.

You're gone; I stay planted
in a desert of me, dunes only

creeping off to cleave
the heavy string
that clutched you to me.