From Dust To Dust Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Evening falls on me, a beige sheet
of ground bleached dust

in a swarm of buzzing bees
blowing off brown dust
spreading glassy wasp wings.

Fleeting off my touch,
dripping with sprinkles of baked hue
from a day's tunnel
of a deep expanded furnace.

O evening, your body
the melting wings of a burnt-out
day, when dough molded
out of thickened desert dust

bounces on a table
spinning off the brown smoke
of a chef breathing himself out

of a massive butterfly
spinning on itself,
as it burns the world into early sleep.

(ii)

O candle of light, you grow
Into a dimming screen, a wall
without body, but bones
and flesh from a devouring mammal,

a hot day the only helices
brewing moth breezes
to powder me with cinnamon
and tawny smoky dust

and air's cellophane skin
of umber cruising dusk settling
on a head-loaded crowd of me
slimmed down into

the walking sack of bones
that once sliced
through the heavy leaning

shoulders of a woven
and interwoven forest of whistling trees
and slapping palms of pinnate leaves.

(iii)

In the stretching desert
of this well-baked evening
blowing dust into rolling pecan hills
of rocky sand and dust,

my life behind a thumping vehicle
of me glows
in the gold of evening light:

One horizon falls on another
with a hug raising a cloud
of dust, spirals in the air kissing

each other with the folded arms
of a rising tornado,
when love explodes

into a thickened bleeding sky
dripping with red tulip
and cream marigold flower splashes.

(iv)

I fly on a shivering feather,
while the world rides
on a wheeled boulder

crushing dusty clouds
and a rough slab
of drifting eroded rock
into a marbled floor,

when the world hangs on
beneath a flowery sky
planting more pink and indigo flowers

over thorns and cactus spikes
in an earthly garden
drifting into a rainbow-burnt shore.

Evening rises into a mound
of dust over the deep
stretchy bed of my eternal sleep.

Solitaire, Namibia,1994