Brightest Flower Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Over the garden's
low trees
far-flung across
an eastern thicket,
he hunts
swiping the bushes

with his eyes carrying
arrows and spears,
not for a kill,
but a deep kiss of love.

O eyes, dive out
for a gem of a flower
flung down
from sun with wings
of sprinkled stars.

With an arm's breath
that sweeps low
grasses sprawling amid
bleeding rhododendron

flushing out
love's blood across
the tight-lipped grasses
that speak only with hue.

(ii)

When hands cannot
brush and spray
a whimpering,

sniveling baby
with the rolling, bouncing
cushion of touch
from a warm hearth
of burning love,

let stretchy eyes
with praying mantis limbs
grab a prey
of bright sun flung out
from the core
of a spinning sun's corona.

Not the dahlia
with its thousand
communion-plates to sit
beneath my chin,
as I'm stroked by God.


(iii)

Not the magnolia
with its starry spinning tray
serving out meals
to orphans touching
my inner core

burning into the ashes
of man's evil
still in flames within me.

But just the sight
of love hurled at eyes
by hands of sun,

as I see a robin struggling
to unchain itself
from knotted grasses,

and my deep orison
of love shot out to wings
sent by God.

And with my muttered
mumble like a buzzing bee's,

the imprisoned robin
is flipped out to fly
into a daisy sky beneath
a cerulean ceiling
spinning with love,
the brightest flower on earth.