Birds For Early Dinner Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Light shoots down
its soft-hurled arrows,
streaming threads
of rays from the spool
of a cream bulb.

Sitting like an egg
under a wind-rattled ceiling,
a squawking
flat-bottomed hen
squawking in a breeze,

as it hatches more
softer showers
and flying feathers
of splashed light.

Falling, bouncing
with white baby birds
trotting with specks
and sailing patches
of bulb-borne suns.

Flashing feathery rays of light,
as they trot
on their thin pearl claws,

scratching our brows
to rub our elastic faces.

How they dab
our skin hairs
with creeping and rolling
cotton balls and beams
from a flying glow.

How their wings flap
off softer and lighter
cotton balls
and wallowing ellipses
of rolled-on light.

(ii)

Late afternoon grows
more shades of sun
as its afterfeathers fit

on us with threads of light
overflowing
from our stretching sleeves
of eiderdown dresses.

Tucked in closely,
buttoned
and zipped down
with floated hairs of thinner rays,

unfolding crystals
from falling waves of flames
spat by diving suns,

as they pull down
stretchier gray
and silver flying hairs of white
and alabaster air.

(iii)

How rolling hairs
of crawling light
from ruffled wigs of fluffy
feathered gray light

bounce on
and on, until cream air
hangs on white air.

And flips over
lower
down to sinking
tightly belted waists.

But a louder light
melts us down
deep to our toes

fiddling and creeping
with chicks of light.

(iv)

In our axed, chiseled-down
and sword-split
socially-
distanced plates,

ringing into physically
air-glued ears,
we saw and slash off
only chick wings of light,

as we wait for birds
that had flown off,
when we rang the doorbell.

We're now left
with only afterfeathers of light,

as we swim through
flames of a hot wait
burning out down feathers

on our wings of patience
that no longer flap.