If Moon Rusts Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

If moon rusts
without the blanket
of air that feeds me
with sailing stars
and flying meteorites,

who will toss light
onto me at night,
when swords and fire
also breathe out

splayed night,
leaving dark rattling blight
to shine on a garden,

sprinkling early drops
of blood to hatch
sun and its stretched arms
of rays falling, falling

into holes and deep
valleys beneath my head,
my bed resting
on tumbled splashes

of light, as the moon
coughs out night breezes
thick and strayed beetles
tumble with clicks
from night's keyboard.

(iii)

Calling up mooing night
in fumes and smoke,
turning a clock in Ngarbuh,

Camerounian men
spraying death on children
and women,
as they sleep in a rusty
night hurling moon splashes.

Sprinkling feathery light
into dust and the night
of a cover-up to flow
with a river sweeping off
all rays of night light, as night slithers

through swamps and bogs
of memory, where last
night's blood settled on low
ridges still red with the mulch
on hands that pulled

triggers on shadows of women
and children, widowers
dispatched to hang
in a burping breeze of night

brewed by the melting
candle of a red moon leaving
a cream and silver trunk
of wax molding back the moon

into the rounded shoulders
of an egret on a thick
ambling bull grazing off night.