Hunting Trip Minutes Past Midnight Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

It's been raining, drums
and slashes of lance swings.
Sky has been shooting
down arrows to pierce a poet's pen
swimming in a lake of ink,

but picking blinking flowers
for a dry heart in the desert,

no metaphor to lace stars with lightening
swinging its lanky sword
to awaken the hunter-poet to burst

out of himself into an ocean
squiggle on high seas, a fisherman
etched out on a rocky field,
soft fibers of water its blue and emerald sheet.

(ii)

Rain drops on roofs tap size
and bass drums
and pour silver stony grains
on a leathered earth
of pebbles
with a warbling wail.

The warbler is soaked into a lump
of butterfly flowering
an angle of a poet's refuge,
as he bites night's skin,

the beaming darkness of his page
flipped over by a hand
from the darkening blotting storm.

(iii)

Rain breaks its drumsticks
into flying wheezing pieces
and whispering leaves
flutter of a light-collapsed balcony,

where stars fall
and explode at the tip
of a poet's waxy pen spinning a nozzle,
where a moon-feathered
animal must be ferreted out
of a gleaming silvery shaft of light,

the needle and thread
to stitch the moonlit plastic of a wet night
with an extended metaphor

stretching its hands high to break snow
castles of a moon's silver
pasting plastered hands on the wall,
the animal the poet doesn't kill,

as the moon bleads with slithering light
fleeing into shadows under a moon-lit tree.