A Night's Teacher Poem by Felix Bongjoh

A Night's Teacher

(i)

We've grown shadows
below expanding shoulders
into crawling floating kakapos
trailing squeaking squirrels,

as they scamper off
tree crowns to touch
the shimmering sun's feathery skin
breaking off into cotton patches.

The moon's chubby cheeks
rock a baby in her cot
of night flying with wings of soot.

(ii)

How a blackboard of night
unfolds lengthy chapters
of staggered night growing

into a star and a dot
not bringing dark dawn's call
to a nailed and hammered-in stop,
another flip page of night

trailing a rumbling thunder
to drive in a rusty nut that leaves
night hanging, sinking into light.

(iii)

The kookaburra's call
trails the laughing parrot's bawl,
when a voice's engine is heaved
by a storm's voice

turning morning's night clock
to midnight, as a wind blows
brown dust into the white afterfeathers
of a footslogging dawn.

A white page bleached by mist
shrinks the world further
into fog that is not a day's white page
full of sauce pans of magnolia,

drizzle of rain flying through
with the hands of a quivering teacher
leaving squiggles of worms

to wriggle down a learner's hole
and leak off to a drain,
holding no feathers of a snowy day
and no thick fur of a black sheep.

(iv)

Night and day, crow and stork,
flying into each other,

as coals from a wildfire flip
a starry night over
into egret wings of daylight.

Kids, walk not in a woolly night
to bump into your melting
shadows when a yawning sun

shoots out rays into faces
blank like a snowy piece of day
showered by the smoke
of melting mist and fog, in which

weedy minds have grown too
much grass without cutting off
clinking glass from rattling brass.