RHYME TIME

To rhyme or not to rhyme? This is a question that many poets struggle with and the majority appear to fall into the “Not” camp.
I tend to enjoy rhyme, however unfashionable it might be, although I’ll happily write non-rhyming verse when the spirit or subject move me to.
Today’s poem, however, is a rhyming one that was a pleasure to write, even if the subject matter is rather less than joyous. 

Image by Igor Morski

 














LAST MOMENTS



In these last moments, timelessly, whatever hinges things breaks free.
A great wind blows throughout the world. The map of nothingness is whirled
and tumbles out a pair of dice: no sixes there, but fire and ice.
Brave swallows, in a turquoise sky, soar over riverbeds, once dry,
that now cascade abundantly through altered landscapes to the sea.
Wild children, with unearthly powers, split boulders, from which, blossom flowers
that garland mountainside and flow, like liquid honey, gentle, slow
into lush valleys, suddenly alive with butterfly and bee.
The air seems charged, soft rabbits stir as wind caresses tawny fur,
from sunlit woodland step young deer, no longer having cause for fear.
The dancing hare evades the hounds, the dray-horse on his weary rounds,
shakes off its harness, gallops free, the sapling transforms to a tree,
each branch adorned with singing birds whose notes translate to human words
that sing of history and fate and how it is too late, too late.
In auburn earth, young foxes sleep while fish, like phantoms of the deep,
with ghost-eyes, pallid, silver-grey, in crystal pools, suspended, sway
a hook’s point from untimely death. Moor ponies, with their apple breath,
grey-granite-hoofed and shaggy-skinned stand silently and sniff the wind.
As pheasants rise, unharmed by gun, wild bees sip nectar in the sun,
the field-mouse, in its grassy nest, sleeps safe: the barn owl is at rest
and yet the owl dreams splintered bone and bloodied flesh, as dead as stone.
The hunter and the hunter’s prey, together in a strange ballet,
one killing and one being killed, yet somehow each of them fulfilled,
perform their pantomime with poise while forests roar with blood and noise,
and deserts, measureless and mean, become mysteriously green.
In these last moments, timelessly, whatever hinges things breaks free.
A great wind blows throughout the world. The serpent wakes and lies uncurled.