Knives Across Night Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

What knife waves itself
through an oil-charged night -
taking the breath
out of my taut sisal-woven, tied sleep -

splashes back itself
on dangling ladders, hangs
on tree branches

crackling off withered
powder-laden twigs
to ease off like gun muzzles,

a roaring fire breaking
into shredded petals
and long-armed creeping anthers
of an eagle-winged thunderstorm.

What sprinkles of lightning
knock at my window,

my coupled self only a widow
down the valley,
where the slashing light dies.

Light cripples itself
into silver dwarfs on crutches.

Rising to stitch themselves
into less foggy clouds of light.

(ii)

Butchering raffia palm trees
into shadows over
a lake stretching into tumbling
moon-lit skies spinning

on their heads, as legs and feet
of a storm are flipped
into dread-locked air bowing down

to find lost temples and cheeks
in a stretched-out marsh
of earth, the hearth
left by a thunderstorm's breath.

What blush of light
stretching out its hand
to the creeping mint lance that cuts it off

to wander through shrubs
and low grasses munching chunks
of mounds and hillocks,

hills and trees too stiff to climb
in the mass of a dim cotton
mass raising night to ceilings of sky.

(iii)

A ray cuts in to carve out
the groove, into which a foot
is planted to climb out of deep sleep

into a cutting arm of lightning,
as morning bleeds into daylight,
as folks rise counting

the wounded and the dead
after a stormy night of muzzles
from whispers, knights

bowing to the sun-balled eyes
of a tall monarch
rolling out light to stretch out

feathered swords of lightning
to sip off the hemlock of a wound,

lipstick-laden lips floating
against the mascara face
of a flying dawn
dropping off flowery scars
from a coal-laden night.