Swelling Glow Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

I lit a candle
to glow and shoot arrows
at a sun's crown
turning its lips

into a black dot
on a butterfly's cloak
in the daylight
of my terrace.

Shaving off winds
and feathers
of smacking gales.

But the wallowing hands
of sun rode on
rails of light pulled out
from end to end,

dwarfing my candle's tall eye
into a creeping
firefly from a smoker's spit,

a flicked-off match stick
left to crawl with ants
it ate before breathing out

hairs of dark smoke
as it died under
a tramping smashing foot
in a boot heavy as stone.

(ii)


The whispering candle light
grew with mutters
and whispers hatching

a buzzing bee
that showered the wax-fed light
with its pollen
to explode into a January sun.

But the candle swelled
its glow into a saw-edged
petal with wings
widening its contours

to fly the world
to the bright sparks
of a blacksmith's bellows
pumping out spirals
of light to rise from
a firefly's whistle growing higher
than a gale into lilies

flipping out swords of flames
from a heart

molded out the ash and smoke
of an arched bow,

a tall eucalyptus tree
on its knees by a crooning river.

(iii)

As a thick-lipped gold flame
totters and dies
in the wind of a whisper,

a breeze from the arms
of a fallen tree wave frost
and parakeet ribbons

at me, as I light up another
candle under the shade
of another tree, its dome stretched

into the nook of tumbling flames
that die, as life's glow
burns through a tree-sized heart
wearing a hat of sun.