She was the unicorn who
Danced across center stage
On feet as light and soft as
Morning mist across the grass
You felt the wide wonder
Of all the children watching
Almost as if they too were
Unicorns flying free as air
From the plane window
Unearthly sky floor stretches
Impenetrable
Unending white clouds luring:
Pathway to a changeless blue
When melancholy,
That ancient shadowed sorrow,
Wanders the mind’s corridors,
Darkness rings the world of memory
Until through the haunted hours,
Shines a sudden song,
Glint of golden tambourines:
Your name remembered,
Surprise of lost laughter becoming light.
It’s best to let the past depart;
Why harbor such remembering:
What made the wound, who broke the heart.
It’s best to let the past depart;
Why hold we fast the fiery dart
That keeps the pain still embering?
It’s best to let the past depart;
Why harbor such remembering.
It’s best to let the past depart
And search each day for the bright new songs
To mend the wound, restore the heart.
It’s best to let the past depart;
Let new horizons’ healing art
Erase the ache of the unearned wrongs.
It’s best to let the past depart
And meet each day with brave new songs.
EL Nino in capricious mood had made
A desert, bare as moonscape, and life-springs fade
On the Altiplano
The hills and valleys once alive and green
Are now gray dust; no flower, no plant is seen
On the Altiplano
Some, hopeless, leave the only home they’ve known
To vanish, like sand, scattered, wind-blown
On the Altiplano
And leave behind the few who choose to stay.
At night, they dream the past: sweet falling rains.
At dawn, with heavy hearts, see drought-dead plains
Still on the Altiplano
On the Altiplano the hungry children cry;
Death stalks the barren fields as their world grows dry.
Oh, pray for those of the Altiplano
Pray, friends,
That soon the rains will come
So hunger ends
On the Altiplano
The stories, sordid and old, building-engulfed,
Stumbling tuneless all day along the weary concrete,
Now pendulum-culled have stuttered into quiescence.
Grey-hymned evening, virgin-shadowed,
Prayer-mantles tired turrets and beaten streets.
The stroking stone floats a breathing spell
On lyric twilight; then with darkening plunge
Swims into night’s nebulous song:
The city sleeps,
And dreams
Of sequestered hills
And the green-leaf music
Of wind-filled trees.
Soft footsteps running
Giggles of pure happiness
Welcome lights in the eyes
Can melt the hardest heart.
How can I explain my heart
When my child runs across
To throw herself headlong
Into my open waiting arms.
No purer love exists than
The love of a child for her mother.
Where did I lose the wonder,
That wonder in my child’s eyes?
Do you sorrow?
Sculpted straight
Strong
With stone veil
a blue shield
about flawless countenance
lowered eyes
and perpetual smile.
Ah, lonely mother
Upon whom the light has fallen
To cast a shadow on the son.
Do you sorrow?
For Phillippa Berlyn
(Upon reading “Hills of Inyanga,” POET Magazine, 1967)
From over the mountains
Of a far-off land
Hills of Inyanga call
Across the world,
Beyond the seas,
The hungry hills call to me,
Their mysteries borne
Through the night
And fog of distance
Between the sound of the horn
And the light of the beacon
#Phillippa Berlyn #Inyanga #POETMagazine
On the great ruined ball
hurtling in futile orbit
through timeless lightless space
rivers of death writhed to turbulent seas
pounding a thousand forsaken shores.
Desolate plains starved unmourned
beyond monstrous mountained wastes
dissolving down dark continents.
In the pestilent vaporous valleys
warped eagles coughed and screamed
in sullen, swooping circles.
Black panthers and lawn leopards,
grown grotesque, prowled and growled
through lethal jungles.
Across the vast carrion land
desolation dragged,
and gnarled towers loomed and leered
upon the devouring devastation.
The planet Earth was dead
and Man its soul had fled.
#Science-FictionPoetry #Poetry #EcologicDisaster #EarthDay