The Red Garden
The human form a fiery forge
All day emotion kept skipping on heat.
Now my mind’s unruly as the bonfire horizon —
a forest
of red tendrils that refuse to fade.
All day I tore up shades of beige —
scribbled anger across plain paper.
Now I’m here
tugging at a loose thread on intensity’s sleeve.
At the end of excess, pine trees line up in rows,
march side by side into darkness.
It’s all right though.
Tomorrow the clouds
will go on writing with quills of wind,
and a fine rain
will fall and keep on falling
until it washes everything in glassy light.
The subtitle is a quote by William Blake and the poem is a bit of a riff on his poem, quoted below.
“A Divine Image.”
“Cruelty has a Human heart
And Jealousy a Human Face,
Terror, the Human Form Divine,
And Secrecy, the Human Dress.
The Human Dress is forgéd Iron,
The Human Form, a fiery Forge,
The Human Face, a Furnace seal’d,
The Human Heart, its Hungry Gorge.”
If you liked this poem, you might try this one:
