Momentary wary sniffing visitor
Remote unmanaged ancient mystery
Flickers in your revenant amber gaze,
Prowling the pharoah's dusty gardens
For prey gone a thousand years, still time goes by
More slowly in the space from which you appear.
Egypt is no longer, this makes you watchful
In the changing light beneath the light foliage.
And clouds come over those great soulful windows,
Your portals on this clouded stranger world.
If you could speak to us, what would you say?
My name is Time Wanderer, I come from far
Away and remember none of what's happened to
Bring me this distance to look in your young eyes.
Black jaguar: photo by Ron Singer
That is a most beautiful jaguar. And indeed the big cats do seem to go back so far and know so much... but maybe they just know they could have us for breakfast.
ReplyDeleteI was reading Recollections of Gran Apacheria today and was reminded, reading this, of a piece from it:
ReplyDelete"The Slipping of the Wheel"
They were sentenced to observe
the destruction of their World
The revolutionary implications
are interesting
They embody a state
which our still encircled world
looks toward from the past"
Something here and in your poem about the movement of perspective through time helps give a better sense (another perceptive glance) to what's happening to us here....
Lovely poem!
ReplyDeleteZeph and Dale,
ReplyDeleteBeautiful creature indeed. And perhaps this momentary visitor does watch us as would have once an Apache. But from somewhere even more alien.
A few nights trying to click-enlarge my way just a bit deeper into the black jaguar's immanent alien world (as also that of the ocelot on "Persistence of Memory") revealed that the glass window is alas aeons thick. And/or I am.
Still without one's frustrated twinges of biophilia what would there be left to say for one. Not that those twinges do the jaguar any more good than would, say, a zoo visitor.
My reaction to humans who visit zoos, when I project myself into the world of the black jaguar, is pretty much that of
this black jaguar in a German zoo--who can plainly take them or leave them.
What a delicious creature...
ReplyDelete