Wonders Poem by Daniel Brick

I

Just past the moon-curved waterfall
a woodland goddess changes
into a slender girl with red-brown hair
bent over in reverie,
then into a broken tree trunk
with white-brown bark

torn to show the inner red wood...
Cloud-smoke floats over a grassy plain:
six horses graze in slow motion,
light rain washes their red-brown hides.

A score of pigeons circle twice
before winging out of sight.

II

Tai Kwan Do aspirants
in white swirls of abrupt gestures
envelop their instructor
deep in concentrated calm,
beyond those still attacked and attacking...
Somewhere nearby,

a bigot's mind is healed:
cut down by cancer, he is cured
by chronic pain from causing hurt,
prays for life, all life, his life.

Between partners divided by doubt
the Choice coils, ready to strike.

III

Again Joseph is summoned.
Dreamers proclaim his speech
as lucid as sharp colors converging
on a fauvist canvas,
as spontaneous as two dancers leaping
through shared space.

Playing Shakespeare's Hermione
an actress adds subtle inflections
to each night's performance,
steadily turning Character into Self.

Three dancers gather imaginary flowers,
fling them over an embracing couple.

IV

A young poet drops his pen, astonished
by the twenty lines he has just written,
certain it is the Poem of Total Realization...
A blind Cyclops cries for beauty,
King Fool pants for a purifying stream,
the youngest priestess stares into the oracle fire.

An alien astronaut,
hurtling across Jupiter's lordly orbit,
in a blink of light speed,
feels Space Rapture

for the first time in six hundred years
of space flight.