The Beginning Or The End Poem by Felix Bongjoh

End of the beginning

An egg drops, cracked,
And a chicken
Hatched is dead.
Thickens the bedrock
Of life past, draped in dust:

A cycle of life gone,
And death is sketched
In one short stroke,
A straight line
Sitting on a deep crust.

Beneath a regolith
Is the place
Where everybody ends;
Shines the stamp
Of artefact.

The noisy dust
Harboring crawling insects
Prickles the skin
Of eternity, all sinking
Beneath a single layer

Into the past.
A grave's eyes focus
A lens on the past, birth's cradle
A mere procrastination
Of when the future ends
In a coffin.

But who cares
About the beginning
Spinning the end? As whirlwinds
Cast us - every speck - in a spiral
Of color and sound:

The bird in its unique squeak,
The lion groaning
In a familiar thunder,
Nothing else but day and night
Shouting to each other in familiar tones,
Burning themselves out

Into fog and dew,
Into rain,
Into the rivers that end in silt
And drain themselves
Into a sea, its floor breeding

An end never ending
From which
A beginning sprouts
With fish hooked
In their own profligate nets -

The interwoven plot of gull,
Whale and shark -
Before the fisherman casts his net,
The trevally's revenge stirring a gyre
Of the assailant assailed
To thicken silt and dust.

Even the lion and the crocodile
Are the hunter's prey
And the regolith preys on us all:
Who sits on who,
The beginning or the end?