Gaudy Bird Of Early Night Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Scarlet clouds stitched
and torn into shreds
sail black on plasmatic sheets
to bleeding canines.

Drops of blood string across
sky, as a dog barks.
A cow moos the beginning
of a drawled crackled rumble.

A stained sky in rags
spills threads to fly across
holes of undropped rain.
They hang on poles of silver.

(ii)

Needle clamp and spool spin
at work to patch every
piece to the crimson bird
that lands with evening on its feet.

Sprawl on, sprawl on,
torn garnet shirts zigzag-stitched
into wing and crow
melting into the a smoky cloud.

And when the evening
is half-ripe with roses and lilies,
locusts of small cloudy patches
graze on the them.

(iii)

The clouds are sailing down
by a winged nimbus,
as smoke rises from houses below
and hover in cotton balls.

From a rooftop dark smoke
rises into a bird's red-cheeked head,
a crow flipped out
and a pointed beak, a hoopoe bird

flipping out a the red crest of a head
swelling to a scarlet macaw
and a flame-sized fountain pen beak
sketching the tail of a fire's frame,

as head and body of a swollen bird
in its flapped wings pop out
in a stretched-out gaudy gown,
the full-bodied fire of a conflagration,

red spears hurled by a hovering
gunship diving back into nimbus clouds
wearing a hurricane's crown
and the pedaling arms of a tsunami.