Green Daylight, Dark Sunrise Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

After May has sauntered
through shrubs and crawling leaves,

stretching out gouty fingers
of bean pods, as scare crows fly
with whips in racing tottering winds,

June drills and stations scouts
of full-grown green stalks
swollen with glowing fleshy green leaves.

Emerald cobs stick their heads
out of bags clinging to petioles.

In the rustling wind, they whimper
for more sun that is poured
in sprinkled and bunched rays.

(ii)

The stalks stand in bright green
uniforms of nylon leaves
polished to shimmer under glittering
suns tilted at oscillating angles
to groom fields with gold powder.

The hanging fruits of tilling
and spine-breaking jabs at deepened
earth shoot out tongues
of tassels to ask the sun for
sprays of more light and blaze.

Air flies with green wings
and stretchy-brimmed pinnate leaves
curling over themselves
and this mists left by crawling insects.

across cornfields bubbling
with tassels from whistling kettles
in a heeling wind of harvest
under the watch of a sneaky apalis
and the talkative warbler.

(iii)

The green sea of stalks
carrying cobs like pampered babies
flows in undulating waves,

rising gradually to giant stems
hitting the shores of a clearing,

where trees take over
and thin out, as thicker bunches
of stems gallop into fern

and harlequin stalks carrying
many more babies than
any other row or column of the field.


(iv)

Air has been green, shadows
breathing out chlorophyll.

The sun has struck green stalks
and polished green cobs

to beam with renewal from
a bouncing, jumping harvest
around the corner in days to come.

But after a noisy crackling,
bumping night, a storm of puttered legs
and devouring hands

stifled by warbling stretches
of light rain,
has left of fields weaves
of hacked stalks and leaves.

What was a green field
before everyone retired to bed
is now a jumble of interwoven leaves

and stems, stamped and pressed boots
of BIR soldiers having battered
crops into the rolling fire
of a tawny desert,
leaving the village in an eclipse.