Lovely Colored as Lucifer Before His Fall

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

The pheasant, once a copper reptile, now

A Buddha bird, encompasses the world.

His beauty has a past of slaughter’s brow,

Blood’s scarlet but with glistening feathers furled.

The pheasant, once a reptile dinosaur,

Chomped down on crying reptiles that it ate.

It slurped up dinosaurish veins and gore

Before we humans caused atomic hate.

This dinosaur evolved to be a cock,

A vegetarian of nut and grain.

In loving’s time, though, he returns to shock

Of eating other creatures, gulping down their pain.

  He turns again to be an Eden snake

    With wings not feeling any guilty ache.

© Phillip Whidden