Hope Stitches Broken Parts Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

A vase falls and bleeds
with shards and dusty crystals.
The clangor catches ear
and eye and calls for a dash

to cut off pieces from
further breaking and shattering.
We stitch together every piece
to petiole and every pore
of the beaming diamond flower.

Thunder warns rain, just as
chirps tell the drinking ear,
cicadas are hopping by.

And a storm of other flying
and skipping bodies must follow,
as lumps of showers lick us.

(ii)

Like locusts we too buzz through
every flesh of leaf and stalk
and roots of furniture
which like hanging feet,
plant the upright into the ground.

Under the bed we're planted
deeper than the quadruped bed,
our earth spinning on a quiet axis
we cannot hear. But when
a crater cracks beneath feet

and we shake with quivering
plants, birds dive out of nests
to fly uphill for blanketed shelter,
and bunkers in quiet stones.

(iii)

With the grunting voice
of a hammer on earth's slab,
slow worms are spurred to shoot
themselves out of holes

and crawl to castles off dark
walled-in holes stronger
than forts in the open plastic air,

where they stitch themselves
under creeping leaves
to strings and clayey limbs of earth

nailed in only with a thick
slab of hope and love stitching
broken parts into stems
and bones that hold flesh together.