Crossing Life's Bridge Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Bowing to kiss
earth's flesh of dust
carries us
along the bridge
of an orison.

Let us bow
to mumble, hatching
unwanted shadows
kicked and smashed
into sludge

beneath soles,
as we march
to the rhythm
of the hardening orison.

I sit on arches,
piers and pillars
aligned in columns,
looking down

at cobblestones
splayed
and sprayed
to lie shoulder
to shoulder

between sun and moon
of a sleeping
daylight
and an awakening dusk.

(ii)

Flashing out
a splayed scarlet sky
bleeding
with cuts on the flesh
of an early
twilight of scars,

the firmament
churning
light-feathered drizzles
into chunky
downpours, as I cross

one short bridge
to another
and onto a viaduct
that links bridges
crossed with tunnels

over floods
and deluge after
fast-flowing streams

between orchards
and sprawling
gardens and cornfields.

(iii)

With my telescopic
eyes and ears
piercing misty distance
over a horizon's stars,

as I drink
both color and sound,
birds riding
on feathers' hue
and voices' alto

to die in the bowels
of a schema's
machine grinding stimulus
into perception

that sinks down
into a song's throat,
a thrush sharpening
its voice,

as I look down
at jagged hanging
walls rising

from roots planted
into undulations
of marshy land,

O hammock
of my rocker
swinging me over valleys
and gorges,
as I sit under a parapet
by my veranda.

O swing
to the next section
of a viaduct,

the bridge of my orison
growing stretchier
fields of fruit and storm

to swallow the fruit eater,
a repenting cannibal
crossing, as he devours self.