A Sailor's Song Poem by Felix Bongjoh

An arching night's flash may not be my last light,
As a new dawn delivers a sun in a new crown.
A splash of sun waves, the only ocean from
A glass of crystal water, has fed me, bathed me.

From water of sweat threads stitching nerve
To flesh, I stand held down to the sea bed
That tosses me back up to ripples of a smile,
Stretch me out in a songbird's reedy pad of braids.

Roll me over to me, O breeze-coated shore,
Where spume and froth even out into a bridge,
On which I walk to me on a marbled floor
Of me, a ship setting sail for a storm-hurled bank.

On a shorebreak tossing me out into a voyage
Beyond ocean edges, where desert erodes
My keel, rips off all hull's ribs, a somersaulting wave
Jumps up, a splash of squawking sea gull:

Nobody sings louder than a hurricane pushing me,
A cotton flake, through moths of foams and mist
Hurled by a simmering volcano, magma puffed out
Into the broken shore of a room's bed with no legs.