Tiger
When the tiger puts his paw into
The rising
Pool of mist by the riverbank,
Then will
The cry
Of all
The worlds be stilled,
While clouds
Of moons dance solemnly
In pale shrouds.
What wild lands have they killed
Now, those hapless hurlers of spears,
Makers
Of cities, and sellers
Of strange, stolen fears,
They who haven’t an eye
That can see?
Yet they too
Live at the behest
Of the mud-churning
Floods that fall
Fast on the dry
Plain.
Who
Is this mythic tiger
Who so gladly drank
Up time and eternity,
Splashing
Still
In the wide water?
Is it time to be done
Now, to follow
Him into the sky-blue
Tall-hilled
Land, to be gone,
Like the vanishing one,
Into the cavernous west
Where the great stones that hallow
The ground,
Shine gray in the singing
Rain,
Where the black paws of the night run
On the rock, with no sound,
Where the winds ever go
Like white-toed moths, wafting
Among the gold cactus of the dawn?
Painting and poem by Sharon St Joan. To see a larger view of the painting, click here.
Such magnificence is hard to conceive of. But,then, so is everything that is fundamentally/primally important. Nature. Our planet. Even us.