A Monarch's Drink Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(to a king sitting with an elephant's bulk on subjects) .

(i)

A whirlpool in a jar
is lighter than one
in an effervescent glass of water

no one wants to drink
in a drummed gulp.

A drink from a cow's horn
swells a man's moo

and spins the crowd
to devour
the monarch perched

on a rolling boulder,
a gorge deepening
a crater's roaring mouth.

(ii)

How life skips on
into slithering lizards
on fibrous waters
gliding in branches

into sun-glistened
corners downstream,
a tide punching
holes into hugging stones

wedging a gray-bearded
shrub held down
by hooks of age and anchors
of deep clogging silt.

A glassy cloud drifts
to an edge hanging
on the woven and stretched
thread of a feathery patch.

(iii)

It swells back to an egg
in a crystal tray drifting
in a gale to a deepening vale.
It's a bulk of glass in free fall.

Clang, bang, clink.
Groan, growl too. Crocodiles
in a bellowing storm.

And the tumbler dwindles
into a dancing
small glass of tea twirling
with words to powder
a shrunken face

clattering and warbling
like palmate leaves sipping
saw-edged angles
of a bouncing hurricane.

(iv)

O King Typhoon,
you'll only slip by to a hole
like a wing

cleaved from
a strayed sparrow-hawk

on a beaming beach
breathing out into
a chunk of tsunami
to flutter into a valley,

folks having shot
themselves uphill,

from where
thorny leaves and stalks

overflow the glass
from which you
sip a long and short drink.

(v)

Why? In a storm floating
gowns into expanding wings,
and planting horns

into folks' shoulders rising
above stony heads,
let a storm of song

slip into a monarch's ear,
the horned drink
he gulps down
from a cup's slab of stone.