Knighted Night Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(based on a childhood memory)

(i)

Woolly night,
bushy night,

charcoal moon fallen
into a deep
dark ditch wearing
a mountain's hat.

In the hall of a road,
the thick
of untouching hands,

double-hemmed
black merino fabric.

The trench
through a low-ceiling air
in silent whispers.

A thin funnel's neck,
when feet
on a blind road don't land

on the soft foam
of pebbled earth,

but on a cobweb skin,
the moth mouth
of a deep tube's throat

sinking into a carpet
of sprayed
tentacles, a scorpion.

Air is a dim woven pit,
a nimbus
wriggling out of folds
into round corners

in a gorge stretching
into stitched
dark biting teeth cutting
through sticking
tongues of untailed light,

shreds and leaves, night
gaining a tree's height.

(ii)

At the gate to a forest
slamming down
a blackboard of night,

pressing me
into a crater of onyx,
no crow flying,

as wings of spider
flap me through
to the doorless end of night.

In the tunneled depths
of spun soot,

I rise only to dark fumes
on a moonless
mountain of torn-out
woody dark shadows

stitched each to each
and to a wall

before me,
hurling off into my path,

a song of dark hisses
and flying whispers.