Sitting And Riding Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Moment after moment,
Wave after wave
Time rolls in to shore

And rides back to a whirlpool
Where life flips over
To a tide burying the sun.

Wind never stops running,
As time chases it
With the wheels of a wave.

How many times
Have suns died
Swooped into at tombstone
Always sitting in its home

A thousand waves off
A nest of sun
Beyond a griffon vulture's dome
Sitting on its sails.

(ii)

Spiral after spiral
Time steers the driver's wheel
In the wave of wind

And the moon's quiet ball
Paddled by a drifting cloud
Plants itself with light

Splashed across contours
Of day and night
The fisherman rides

Sitting on a sea's couch
Riding a thousand waves,

On a drifting sheet
Shredding its seams at shore
Sighing with a tide.

The cartwheeling porpoise
Pulls it brakes
On a sitting shore.

The tombstone sinks
To its shore
In a sea's bottom

Burying moon and sun
Rising back to steer
A day's rolling ship,

Life bouncing between
Harbor and high seas
Lit by spirals of sun and moon.

(iii)

A whirlpool takes off
From a whistling shore
Drowning a tit's voice

Only to sink
Home to a shark on a porpoise's bed,
Where life begins

By a leg-crossed tombstone
Sleeping on the sheets
Of a sea bottom's bed.

Earth ship, sleep on sea's sheet,
The pall wrapping
Ship and sun and moon,

The shroud sipping
Light and shadow,
The tombstone, leg-crossed
Sitting rooted in a couch

That floats and sinks,
Never dying on its sheet of silt,
From which man spins

And rides on a thousand wheels
Only to sink
To a tombstone's saddle,

The horse that never dies
But gallops across
Waves to a whispering shore,

As life paddles
The shoulders of stone and rock
Sitting in a ship.