The Rainbow
A wave of color binds our sentiments before it fades.
For each emotion, is a subtlety in hue expressed,
And through life’s noble journey, may we add these tints and shades
To vivid cast a rainbow in prismatic lightbeams blessed.
Ephemeral are the tones of life bestowed on halcyon skies,
When heralded by the rainbow arched above its golden eyes.
Progression
The United States with world hegemony
Confronts such countries, vile with exploitation
Diffuse, intense, from sociopathy
Internal bred mid death, severe privation,
Shackling of free will, as liberation
Like a phantom cloistered in the mind,
Episodic stirs o’er desolation,
Inciting wrath and overtones defined
As democratic voices, rapid suppressed, maligned.
Throughout history, empires sudden rise
Yet rule imperious with a common fate
Of fragmentation, ultimate demise.
Allegiances, ephemeral, dissipate
Within a stoic, totalitarian state
Like China, bleak in economic plight
When organized insidious to create
Assent, robotic unity and might
That militarily reigns, a dictatorial blight.
Pollution, poisons, proliferation in arms
Resound mid human rights atrocities,
And weekly coal-fired nuclear plant that harms
Environments across all lands and seas.
Rapacious decimation by Chinese
Officials, rending world resolve and trade,
Is evil, manufactured as disease:
A bankrupting, computer hacking raid
O’ertakes the free world’s jobs, with ethics quick waylaid.
Through trade, production grows toward specialization
As oversight and focus on detail
Allow consumption with diversification
When cultures, intermingling, quell betrayal
And forge a trust to overcome travail.
Humanity as species must assure
That through exchange and mutual timescale,
A compromise, upsurging, would endure
With quality assurance toward expenditure.
Nordic Summer
The hues of heaven enfold on glacial tiers
In iced serenity from summer clime,
Whose glow through arctic midnight perseveres
Profuse with splendor born in nature’s prime,
And wafted through nocturnal fields of time.
Transcendently is beauty veiled, like dreams,
O’erspreading images of life sublime
Which, glassed within the purity of streams,
Find tones of passion opalescent in sunbeams.
The fjords and skies are mirrored in deep marine,
And islanded by clouds which buoyant sweep
O’er rocks and matrices of mountains green,
Precipitous above the fathomless deep
Where shadows interfuse, cascading steep
From palisades amid the silver height.
And flowers entranced with dews and fragrance weep;
Yet unto morn a love may blooms requite
While blessed by breezes drying tears with soft delight.
Mid spaciousness does solitude bear truth,
A comfort through the lone, and mechanistic,
Observation defining mankind’s youth.
Derived from love, with passions idealistic,
Contrasting is maturation, whose artistic
Motifs are moored by wisdom to the shore
Of discovery—moulded by the synergistic
Interplay of inspiration, and lore,
Exuberant with life, though humbling evermore.
Where days must yield to dark, there is illusion
When solar wind impacts with gaseous glow;
Auroral luminescence prompts suffusion
As arcs fantastically entwined o’erflow,
And shimmering sprays and waterfalls bestow
A visionary kingdom in the night,
With vaporous stairways serpentined below.
Effaced by morn, the realm of folding light
Departs with stars suspended in diurnal flight.
The Sunbow
Along the torrent’s perpendicular
Cascading through mists, rises a vast sunbow:
Imbued with passion, this myriad beamed lodestar
Of vigor, reflecting like an afterglow,
Airy spans the azure undertow;
And dividing in radiance, ever soaring higher,
A polychromatic archipelago,
Islanded in water and light and fire,
Dissolves mid vapors, shadowed in a mystic gyre.
Upsurging with the sunbow, is contemplation
Forceful, impassioned in primeval splendor
As colors changing hue shape inspiration–
Oft serene, immeasurable and tender,
Or spiritual with a vision to engender
Beauty, expansiveness, divine as sun
Enrobed in meridian majesty, to render
A consummation of dreams, love, hope when spun
As life’s rich sunbow, whose tones harmonic blend as one.
Robert Woods is a retired physician and poet living in Florida.
Featured Image: “Rainbow” by Nikolay Dubovskoy