Sky On A Bird's Tail Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Whips, woven streaks
out of cold wind fibers,
a blizzard flung
at my narrow flamingo face,

rain swooshed out from
the growling mouth of a storm.

If you bawl and yelp
at me dressed
in my broken branch,

a cloud of quivering
feathers and quills,

I'll squawk back
with the after-tone
of a roar lion's roar

without a mane -
without a claw, without
fire in my yawn:

I'm just the appendage
of a creeping cricket

thigh- and buttock-slogging
on a slanted angle

to toss me deep down
a hole into a small world.

(ii)

With no feathers of leaves
and broad-petaled
flowers of dawn, I'll stand

on the hill's saddle,
the flat stone
of a small rock in my deepening
valley and ask for light,

smoke out every trace of light
within the tower of me
to touch a rising ceiling,

as I lie down stooping
on the thin slate
of a crawling climbing floor

in the lowest story
of my mind's drone, bees
shifting bees' scales
and slabs of a honeycomb.

(iii)

At the door to nectar,
dry leaves swell into fleshy
crawling grass,

the only handle I can grab
behind a peafowl

with no further step to climb,
but the parachute's lever
that flips open the peafowl's tail,
a sky with a million stars.