The Red Sun Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(for George Stinney, a fourteen-year old executed on June 16,1944)

(i)

What mountain has grown
in the feathered room
turned a crater's mouth?

What fire ginger has shot
an elephant flame
to pull out magma from a volcano
coughing out tails
of steam in a stream

of bubbles spilling out
spears of flames
into a boy attired
in a mile-long scream?

A red sun has broiled
a kid's face into a geyser,
hot waters jumping
back to soak man's brow.

Scalding hot waters
from burning face see only
the shifting mist
of man's dark hands.

(ii)

A red moon bulb has fed
heavy flying coals
to blink over
a black boy's head,

shrinking a chamber
into a hot red desert.

Man has been parched
in his own popping furnace
to bake and break
into his own skeleton

bloated and fattened and burnt
into an everlasting night.

(iii)

More than five thousand
volts on a baby boy's head.

More than five thousand tulip heads.
More than five thousand
thousand suns have died,

leaving the world
in an elastic sticky eclipse
still pulling strings

to the edge of a precipice,
where sun never rose.

More than five thousand stars
have crashed into a roaring river
and splashed needles into the eyes
of man's figurine,

his conscience showing
no face in a mirror
larger than sky woven out of sky.