Dove in a Tree...A Poem

The dove's grey and violet-burnished breast

is roughened by the self-important wind

waging war on hapless, flailing limbs.

The dove blinks and starts at gusted leaves

that seem about to sweep it from its hold.

The startled bird grips the heaving bough,

a feathered sailor in a monstrous sea

clinging to a steeply slanting deck,

halyards snapping, flinching as if to flee.

The dove, for the moment, wants the sheltered,

though thrashing tree, not flight in naked air

grown thick with shafts and darts of blown debris.

But, how much buffeting must it bear, how long

be passive prisoner of storm and tree?

Restlessness, impatience grown, despite

the cracking of the sky, the dove propels

on crossbow wings from foliage harbor depths,

bolts arrow-straight, parts embattled space...

and disappears.

Copyright by Don Gray