Candle Light Of Dusk Sun Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

After a croaking trek,
feet grinding
grunting pebbles
and warbling
rolling cobblestones

sitting on breathing
stretchy hollows
scrolling out lizards

slipping off
into holes beneath
grasses and reeds,

he pulls winds
to lift his feet wedging
legs in the mouths
of biting needles

and cleaving waves
of pain chewing him off
from head to toe

and hacking his bones
at every climbing slope
hacking off
his brittle joints,

gusts of breath won't
stitch back to shape.

A slow wind runs
out of breath,

leaving a heavy hum
to hang over him
like a swaying beehive.

Bees, pour honey
into his dwindling
dry breath
slimming down
into wheezes and whistles.

(ii)

The sun switches
out its large-mouthed
flash light
narrowing
into a cream moth.

And a smoky
reddish glow
on a candle's blathering
lips swooshing off

wax to settle
on its trunk,
the man's waist
hardening into stone.

The candle's lips breathe out
squiggles of light
weaving their way
round a feathered mass

of wax, as it lowers
its wick from
a floating butterfly
inside a lantern's globe,

into a leaking ray
of sun, his only daylight
torch to shave off
shadows on his path.

Light also trims
and cuts off snaky legs
of creeping weeds.
.
(iii)

But the weeds
on his path
trail his snail steps

onto to a table
in a café cooling
him into
a freezing
icebox of gloom.

The shepherd
has been sipping
his life out
of a demitasse
of dark cloud,

a cow that slipped off
a cliff and didn't moo
again - not even
with the chopped voice

of distant thunder
mumbling behind the hill,
the only candle light
burping off his sunken eyes.