Out of the ashes of the end
Rises the Phoenix.
Who is this Phoenix
Who flies up through flashes
Of burning embers,
Who extends
Her wings
From the horizon
To the wind-streaked high plateau,
This one who ever dies,
Yet flies
Again
With golden beak
And brown-laked eyes
That seek
Only the stories, true and raven-wandering?
Mountain air gleams;
Glittering stars talk
And walk,
And wend their way
Along the hidden crannies of the skies
And know
Where eagles slip through time’s illusion,
Eagles who remember every eon
And recall the wisdom
Of the glad-winged Hamsa
Who hears
Even now the dawn-invoking, distant drums
Of long-gone dreams.
After the flames of desecrated towns,
Of strange, fossilized soils,
After the blanched wicks
Of all the candles have been snuffed,
And volcanic plumes fluffed
In sobering winds,
After the great ending,
The air clears
Of dim, smoking whiffs.
Then Adi Sesha of the thousand, bright-singing
Emerald crowns,
Older than many worlds before,
Older than the trees of time, ancient,
Floats again
On the timeless mist
Of eternity,
Lifting on his winding coils
The form of Narayana
Who slumbers,
Resting.
Then the Phoenix
Rises through the amethyst
Height,
Over the land where lilies still grow
In the backwaters
Not far from the rainbowed sea,
In the rain,
In the truth where only
The innocent curlews nesting
Play by the rocky shore
On a moon-bent day
There the waves crash, exuberant,
Against the granite cliffs.
©Sharon St Joan, 2018
Illustration: Phoenix detail from Aberdeen Bestiary, Public Domain, Wikipedia
