Saturday, September 18, 2010

Poem: Owl

This poem, a gift from my spirit guide, is one of the best I’ve ever written. It has one of the strongest web presences of any of my works. For instance, you can hear me reading it at this link:

http://rosethorn.podbean.com/2008/10/02/owl-by-chris-crittenden-poem

You can so read it in situ, if you wish, where it appears under a very beautiful work of art:

http://www.dmqreview.com/Aug07/Crittenden.htm


Thank you for reading.

OWL

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Owl

smudge of silence
and mahogany, alert
in onyx, vizier
in a skein of boughs,
scrying the weft of the universe,
observant like Orion,
stalking warm umber--

winged prophet
of secretive night-pines,
obsidian thief,
flying like a riddle
that doesn’t even whisper,
swooping in a merge
of bat and falcon,
neck a whirlpool of fates--

you Hanged Man
in a noose of flutters,
unable to breathe unless you moan.
darkness and forests ordained you,
long ago, when moonlight
fled the trees like rain.

2 comments:

  1. Holy cow.... or should I say holy owl? Stunned....absolutely stunned. Word portraits take a very high level of skill to paint. I love word portraits because they are a kind of divining of the soul. Here it flies as the many-one'd bird. We see into the essence of owl and what that means. It spans the galaxies, it spans time and shows that time is an illusion. We are present in greenness after the rains. If ever I've read an end line that I will remember, this is it.

    Beautiful work my friend. I will copy and keep and ponder. Thank you!

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  2. this is wonderful, i particularly like the first line!

    ReplyDelete