Sparrowhawk On Dawn's Wings Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Early hours through drowsy screens
Sketch and etch out
Octopus-spraying hands and fingers,

Large pink and orange cloth, master
Of sky's cloudy patches, scratch off
Servants of dark furrow-digging pimples
Killing a sprayed indigo with molar-toothed saws.

How soft whispering hills of fog
Rise to choke hundreds of yellow insects
And sliced stars carried in bowls
Of clouds to the servants kneeling to the hood.

(ii)

Let the pink spray the rook
And fortress, on which early burning morning
Is built to glow by the fire

Of a day drifting in whistling streams,
Cascading in a stormy rivers wheezing out
Spirals of smoke and vermilion clouds.

How the day bleeds under the claws
Of crow clouds bleached
Into flying and bouncing feathers.

(iii)

The sky stitches arches and wings
From the broken sketch of a tower rising
With a quiet spiraling, wobbling tornado of a cloud,

A crawling gecko trailing
Tiny frogs of clouds, croaking, as early birds
In trees by my bedroom

Swelling into the inner bowl of a thick jungle
Spinning winged leaves,
As a circus of leaves roll off to half-lit shores,
Sun fighting with the moon,

As light dims and tightens into a rock
Behind bright pink patches

Blowing out into the sparrow hawk to sail down
With the same Sparrowhawk
That pounced and charged at Ngarbuh
And left a river of chirping chicks
To blow the undulating trumpet of death.