Life And Death Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

How crawling and galloping
rocks swell into air
and dive back to flying slabs
of earth, their wings
flapped on terraced banks.

The mighty eagle of coated
fog in a cloud's chassis
drives me wheeled rocks

mumbling to each other about
a digging and cascading world.

Is this what is meant to sleep
on a bumped-out mattress,
a bed swaying in quivering hands

catching the feet of dimmer
higher clouds of rock
stretched out on stretchers of rock?

(ii)

I've found ladders,
creeping to short stands of rock.
They've jumped to a sky
tossing off more skies, every sun
standing on tall lanky legs.

Sun throws down bleached
lawns of sky, long hands
of rolling suns weeding off fog
and elephant-tailed clouds.

My floor is a rug of rocky slabs
flung into a valley,

where lie still caskets of rock
carried by cascades
of diorites, sheathes of feldspar,

this stony drawer by my bed
no longer opening mouth
for jewels of light hanging down

on the splitting rocky walls
of a pillow opening more doors
for short dwarfed breath.

(iii)

Life and death are high
canyon walls, from which a feather
of me flies to the lowest
ditches of rock digging more ditches

until I run into rays
from a sun that sleeps with me
under a cream blanket
over thedark cloud of rocky sleep.

Riding an old broken bicycle
with the legs and feet of an ostrich
flapping the priestly wings
of a black floating cassock.