A Padlocked Night Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(song for the 69 Arkansas boys padlocked in a dormitory set on fire in 1959)

(i)

The sun's straightened wings
were clipped and flipped over

down a cliff, axes and spades
of evening waves
digging into tumbling banks,

as light drifted out
into dark caves of hollowed-out eyes
squeezed into bone and stone.

A cloud jumped with a pole vault
and crashed headlong
onto a dormitory floor unfolding

a bumpy and thorny rug
of faces hoisting nimbus flags
over buzzing ribbons

of slashed grins, bees flipping out
honeycombs against silent walls.

(ii)

Fettered into an undulating
cloud of light
that never dies standing
but dims into dawn's ceiling,

when sun's sun steals
and melts into a river of light,
night flowed into
you, as you shone brighter

than this evening wing of a sky
perched on history's
rising sky-scraping castle.

It's built on a breeze's arc,
as moonstones of boys
shove for straight lines,

man's timeless ablution
in an expanding deepening bowl of earth

done in curves from a gallon of water,
giggling mouths breeding
sun to scoop out deep sun,

as a brighter night rolled
into knots in black weaves of night.

(iii)

As if you'd not breathed in
enough tons of soot
to brighten night folded into night,

a secret eagle dressed in a hawk's
black gown of night
tossed you into a flame's tongue

trembling into a flickering star
that won't lick you,

as you crawled out
of a lion-mouthed flame.

But in the shrinking hard cloak
of night losing its legs
to dawn's gear, only a wall of light

closed in to stand like a deity
on a bank, a river of sleepless boys
bound to each other to rise
to the sun that built and kept them together.