Still, orb-flung beams blaze through broke bracken shards.
Inked rays blank blanket raze: resurgent tans
Colour tint-tattooed ground as trooping guards.
Yet marshalled, here's a hue without a cry,
Causing no timbers tinderlike to crack
Or crash, as fire-forged glimmers sharply fly,
Pounding hurled hew and cry of lumberjack.
Sound sleeping, silver birches bunkered down,
Entrenched in Summer's soot-besotted bark,
Do pine for lichen's Spring-cling of a gown,
Exposed since leaf-flames singed or sang the lark.
Although snow's shroud seems redolent of death,
Die-cast, Sun's fern is redder-lent its breath!
The intended title for this poem was Dainty's Inferno (an allusion to Dante's Inferno), but Blogger didn't like the apostrophe and apoplectically changed it to a fistful of unfitting symbols, enough to make a technophobic Luddite almost faint. This piece was inspired this summer just gone when I noted the reddening ferns and thought 'in fern is etc' could conjure a furnace. It was only when noting their sun-tinted tan this winter that the 'inferno' idea came to mind.
ReplyDeleteI think this is my favourite poem I've read so far. (I have not read them all!) The use of assonance and alliteration rather than your usual rhyme is beautiful. Reminds me a little of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
ReplyDeleteWow! Thanks Bethany! Such an undeserving compliment considering my reticence to write of late. One of my favourite poems is his As Kingfishers Catch Fire:
ReplyDelete'...for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.'
But to strike the tone of that omnipresent harmony is more precious than any ubiquity of publication, but I best get my act together to make my voice more heard!