Continuity Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(of time from night to dawn)

(i)

Night without stars.
Blight-devoured sparks,
leaving no scars.

Onyx without a tapered
dancing crystal
from an insect's sneeze.

No glow worm
bouncing around
to light up
a speck of dusty coal.

No speck from a strayed
flash; no dash
from a spear's dark dot
cutting off

the world's script
of hieroglyphics
from a broken tail
of glided lightning.

Darkness swallows
fingers of light,
and pierce ecru palm lines,

leaving only a fist
of darkness
to punch through
and through.

(ii)

Leaving eyes
in the dusty charcoal
core of a cold
unglowed hearth -

with no moth speck
flitting, fleeing
across night's sprayed ash
thickening, dark,

in spirals, but spinning
no tourmaline -

no black bead I can wear
to complete
the garland of sniveled
digging pain
with a noose of black beads
hanging down my neck.

Crucifying me
to the silhouette
of a carob tree
flipping out arms

to swing across
with leafy darkish branches

stretched out,
a cross's horizontal line,
the only light
etched out
on a stony darkness.

(iii)

But night's boulder cracks
into tentacles
of light bounced off

the head of a far-flung sun
paving the lit road
of night undressing itself
into beams

cruising into full light
without scars of night.

The candle's trunk of dawn rises
from a tapered splash
in its mouth
blurting out life's continuity
from a dark patch

of night shutting its door
to more darkness
of sniveling eyes and nostrils.

Growing, swelling
into the cackling mouths
of crowing cocks

lighting up crimson canvasses
of a ginning painter's sky,
as dawn with downy barbs
blows into insects' whistles.