Green, Terzata #50

This is all I have to say of green —

Not the perfumes or the taste,

Nor all its nuances I have seen.

Green, not red, is the color of haste,

As with all of life,

Little completely faced,

Yet the opposite of strife,

Which is hope (no, not blue),

The blunting of the knife.

Nothing, nothing is quite true.

We act before a green screen.

I speak and act only for you,

My love, scene after scene. 

Note: This is the 50th and last

of the poems I've written in a

form I invented, the Terzata. Below

are numbers 31to 50 in the blog roll.

The first 30 are here: 30 Terzata

The Enlightened, Terzata #49

He woke and ate his freeze

With little sips of fog.

He’d forgotten how to sneeze

Having slept under a log.

He wandered lonely as a cloud

Like a surveyor his Magog,

As the ants stood and bowed.

He smiled with teeth of sun

And blinded the empty crowd.

He’d count to zero and one

The memories he could squeeze

With brains of no and none,

Gulping himself to the lees. 

Nest, Terzata #48

The owl fell from its nest

And cringed among roots

Yards away, fanning its breast.

We couldn’t hear the hoots

Of his mother. He made no sound,

Afraid of raptor brutes.

He was lucky he’d been found.

I took off my shirt.

We wrapped him round and round,

Carried him to his tree, unhurt,

And let him loose. He didn’t rest —

Rising on claws, he girt

The trunk with wings up to his nest. 

Tending, Terzata #47

The oak limb in the yard, bending,

Close to breaking,

Required careful tending.

Upon my waking,

The tree was on the ground.

I hadn’t felt the earth shaking

Or heard its falling sound.

In a few days it was gone,

Its thick stump ground.

I planted another one,

A sapling depending

On me like father to son . . .

Already ascending.  

War II, Terzata #46

It’s possible to destroy even hell

And turn evil to dust

With the dropping of shell after shell.

What remains is one man’s lust

Mating with his own cold will,

Giving birth to blood and rust.

Each bullet or bomb’s a pill

That plugs a hole in his brain,

Which is still,

As is Ukraine,

Where a young child fell

And didn’t get up again —

Her killer dares her now to tell. 

War, Terzata #45

Cold air slipped in the window

Left open overnight.

It’s 100 below zero

And all is either black or white.

Ice leans against our home

As if meaning to fight.

The wind chants a lifeless Om.

“This is our new Ice Age

Under a sun silver as chrome,”

Says the nodding sage.

There’s no bitterness or woe

I could scratch on this page —

The ink has ceased to flow.

 

Grail, Terzata #44

I have searched the homely grail

At work, on the summit of Pike’s Peak,

And in the bills and ads in the mail.

I can only guess at what I seek,

Except that it is lovely and wild.

(Oh, if only I could steal a peek.)

I’ve searched since I was a child,

Less curious than hungry, grasping,

Nothing inside me calm or mild.

The wanting is the asp’s sting,

A surrender to the jailor’s flail.

I cling to the preying roc’s wing,

Without knowing how to fail.