Bobbing Stars Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Rip off the running
creeping sky full of stars.

Unfold it to cover a lawn,
crawling shamrock grass
flittering with KwaZulu
Natal's glow worms.

You'll lie and walk
on a full sky stretched out
to run into a moon
drowning in a lake stretched
and left to creep
into a star-perforated sea.

How many skies are there,
if not as many
as the oval moons rolling
into a sky shaven
of flint clouds, but holding
out a tray of sunshine eggs,

their yolks spreading
into silver and cream patches
of night for a breakfast
gulped down hand to hand
with moon rays.

Weaving through green grasses
spinning jumping cream skies
and skies spitting out
more stars wagged by the tails
and heads of earthworms
and cartwheeling gnats.

(ii)

Peel off this paper
of moon-lit night waving
a catalogue of stars
flipped over from page to page
of a drawn-out glow.

The moon, a painter, spots
clots of flint to erase
into a daylight of bleached night,

when showers of light
fall in fibrous arrows
and powder drifted by breeze
to tumble on pages
of mouse-crawled squiggles.

And cruising scribbles
of my blurred sight
hang on in stretched strings
I cannot read, as the catalogue
rolls of its pages
like flapped butterfly wings

on a daisy night
taking turns
with a candle-lit veranda
breathing in a lantern
splashing pearl.

And cotton sheets unfold
wheeled rover fireflies
and seal-lipped click beetles
crawling to erase stars
that fall on lawns of green rugs.

(iii)

How crawling earthworms
carrying flitting bulbs
pull down more skies to nestle
into corners of lawns.

And floors drifting to a halo
under a candelabra,
as I sit reading a flashy book
boring bobbing starry holes

through plastic mist
and the light flying smoke.

A night of bobbing stars
talks with stammering candles
and a hissing dying hearth,
stars still flying
from its deep ashy hole.

By tussock and bisque
screens of light
poking tongues pierce
cornsilk pages of a sleeping moon
with whispering,

needle-pricking sharp voices,
crickets on lawns
jumping after stars
carried by earth worms
and unscrolled centipedes.

And dumped by dying skies,
stars pointing soft light
at the screaming door
to dawn's fling silhouettes,

let me grab a bobbing star
to wake me up,
when sky's orange bells
of morning ring.

And I hear them
behind bobbing stars.