Power Of The Stone Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Under a stony rocky sky drifting towards
A slanted westward stone wall down
A horizon into a concrete ceiling of sitting boulders,
The sky builds a colonnade of oval stones.

A stone quarrels loudly with a hammer,
But never lets the stone-fisted enemy
Enter it. Instead it splits itself
Into two doorless halves and multiplies

Into granite and pebbles, each
The fearless conqueror of a fat bird
With a rocket wheezed out from a catapult's
Mouth, singing a fast silent song
Through a secret corridor in the silk-skinned air.

The stone eats the stone-crusher's hands,
Leaving built-up blisters to shed tears
When the hand wears a frog's back
And the palm is dressed in cream rags.

(ii)

And as the hammer's heavy molars have eaten
Enough of a palm's flesh, taunting
The palm To have another bite,
Palm bleeds with the milk and blood
And water of life, flying stone grains

A little larger than sand, the crawling
Soldier ants that sting and burn
A rolling spine on the rolled-out carpet
Of a beach, the construction site

That glues a family, a hard tone of stone
and gravel and pebble and sand grain
And granite, graphite sketching edges
Dust flowing in gusts of wind over Far-flung
Air alleys to settle on a monarch's desk.

(iii)

A patch of spidery stone dust powders
The air, lands on the hands-off
Sheet of paper, where soot hangs
With blurry black stretchy spectacles

Under screens of air, red-eyed squiggles
Blurred By films of night and soot
Wearing an eclipse's cloak of a pitch night,

No star guiding the monarch's hand
To a flaming crater of red ink, a prisoner's
Throat hanging on a thin thread,

A slithering script to tighten a loosened
Noose with a scratch, on a sheet of paper
Already the flattened stratus nimbus
Seizing a hangman's cord to save a prisoner.