How Dark The Night Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

How did the world
lose sight of cotton light,
when folks were clothed
in a deep dark blanket of night

that killed all fireflies
of flames on candle lips?

Why did the world
look at itself with a mirror
from a volcano's womb,
a hearth churning
cold floating charcoal dust?

It was after the star-written
number of two
hundred seventy crawled
across moon beams
with a lightning
of fleeing slithering lime lizards.

Sun shines on Da Vinci's
brush to paint a sky
flowering with night

tossed over by the Nevada
Massacre Rim, as night jumps
down and stands, a dyed
stretching blackboard
carrying scribbles,
stars flittering like sparks
from a deep dark hearth.

(ii)

Night has fallen, flat,
with Namib's blanket,
an ebony dark sheet
spread out in undulations.

On Boston's pale flint
tray of air forced down
and swung low
by a graphite evening.

Served by filtered dregs
of dimmed sunlight
shot through a giant
cob web hanging
down slowly, slowly.

In the swayed hands
of gods rising with faces
and crushed shadows
built by light
with dark glassy bricks,

beams and gleams
of a rolled-out grey darkness
bouncing over
from the pores
of a nested sun. Dripping.

Still melting in a coat
of silver wax
and flying out
of carob and tawny reeds.

Alabaster air hangs over
quivering rays
sketching out thin squiggles
of rolling light
from candle-lit houses.

(iii)

The painter of night
still has his brush
sunk into a sable pot of paint
to spray hollows
of darkness not yet jade black,

slats on the world's
window only rubbing more
darkness on a pane
shooting in spidery sparks.

Early carob doorsteps
to a darker drifting evening
swing down

to a full dark tree of night
rooted to loam
in an umber russet cloud
thickened into metal

and a rolling coal blanket
spreading out sheets
from a thick book of night
flipping over a page

with a sprezzatura,
from a bobbing rolling moon
wearing a hat of stars,

its wings reading
in the gold script
of an orange dawn:

Night can be cream
flowing in a paced,
drummed screech of tires
rolling, crawling

slowly with an eruption
of daylight held
out by life's robust candle
on the wheels
of a standing beige skyline.