Thirteen Ways

Thirteen ways

I

I saw a crow rise up in flight,

With the sun in its beak

Blue bright as all her feathers.

II

If a scorpion

Can speak true

Then how can we read riddles?

III

So a single red rose is absolute?

Yet still it fades in the winter wind.

IV

Did you see the red rose and the gryphon

Are one.

V

What the gryphon takes it will hold,

But its claws are very sharp

And the safest way to not let go

Is to devour

What it has torn.

VI

Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

VII

The girl from the south said,

“Ambition is a thing with feathers”

She does not hear the mockingbird

Cry out to the sleepy dawn

That her wings are clipped

VIII

I know old promises

And the weight of beautiful poetry;

But I know, too,

That I saw a dragonfly

Above the stream.

IX

The wolf watched the black bird spinning.

And stretched out her

Improbably coloured wings.

X

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light,

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out sharply.

XI

“It is the loyalty that holds”

The other said

I think I mistook

The shadow of her hand

Beneath that old and fatted moon

For a fox.

XII

The gryphon is moving.

A new wind must be rising.

XIII

The crow did not hear the wolf cry

She was flying

And she was going to fly.

The wolf sat still

So she could watch the sun.

~ Ranae