Giant Black-And-White Flower Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)


Below falling meteorites and comets of light
rolling waves of gems creep across
a spectrum of flowers and rainbows.

Interweaving butterflies
stitched to rolling fireflies. They bask
in stars that dance under a moon glow.


The world tiptoes in a quiet ship
gliding like a massive overblown snail
spreading out its sails,
its antenna bowsprit and cathead.

The crawling snail swells an expanding shell,
a hull and gun port sitting on
the huge snail-vessel creeping across
a moonlit sky, the sea's pewter table cloth

and charcoal bed, on which it spreads its legs,
top and bottom sheets of water
slipping away from a bed spread running
from edge to edge across fibrous waters.

(ii)

Under the sky leaning on a pink
screen grows the mighty over-fattened vessel
dressed in black-and-white chessboard
linen, ever square and rectangle
of an orifice, a white magnolia petal.


Ribbons and graffiti of fireworks
dress up the air with needles and feathers
from showered sparks, white afterfeathers
left by a painter's brush capturing
gossamer filaments weaving a thousand cobwebs.

Who runs away from spiders flees
cotton balls bouncing on for a surgical dressing,
a surgeon unfolding white striped bandages
across the face of a ship bleeding with light.

Night fits itself in a spidery garment.
Night carries white butterflies and stars
on a melting sea, a black log of a candle
spilling white splashes of light wallowing across
charcoal and crow screens of night.

(iii)

Who has sculpted out this stretchy night
into a black-and-white flower wearing mufflers
and sleeves of a butterfly on rolling wheels
across shimmering diamonds of light
goggling at a sea stretching to horizons of sea?

At a harbor of gardeners mulching a sea
for the giant black-and-white chessboard flower,
it takes a gardener to mulch sea.

It takes a surgeon skilled in repairing wounds
bleeding white and beige pus of light,
to come on board with scalpel and pitch-length bandages

to grow and prune off leaves
and shave the stalk and trunk of a flower
sinking deep roots of light into a melting sea.

Let the sturdy flower wave its ribbons of light
over a dark screen riding fog and graphite waves,
a huge rock of sea with sprouting buds of petaled colors.