From A Crater Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Piercing through a tunnel
carving out no window
to the sky beneath my brow,

I fold and roll myself
into a skipping crow
feathered by chills and draughts,

a desert flapping a condor's
wings from an icy river
growing only moss on its banks.

I hover in clouds of myself
over a gorge devouring me,
as I sink, unwinged,

in torn blankets of night,
every crevice a hoopoe's tail
spraying a span of light
on a lifting crane's mouth.

(ii)

In an old garden of vines
in dark gray dreadlocks of years
counted by a baby
flipping through beads of an abacus,

Soot-coated riding
riding a tall horse of night,

how many more
nimbus clouds will jump
out of nostalgia's smoke,

as I sail in the ship
of your drifting breath
to the oars on your beaming face

grown into a flag of light
by a high-shouldered lighthouse
beaconed by white roses

dropping off the teeth of a stormy laugh
mulching green fields
of reef-knotted hugs under a ladder
of fluorescent bulbs

sketching out contours
on the waving flag of your wink

flickering with a thousand
stars of words red out loud
under a comet's flashy eyes:

(iii)

In the ash cloud of your trip
beneath bleeding vents of a volcanic cough,
how many spinels
and sapphires of light did you pick

for me from your overgrown
tree of wounds and pain?

How many sky-scooped garnets
did you harvest
for a necklace and the lover's chain

to handcuff our limbs
into one flow of life's breath?