Monday, January 4, 2016

January 4 -- Maggie Westland

THE LION KING,  Pantages Theater, Los Angeles CA 

JUNGLE PRIDE

How can this memory hold,
The dance of sunrise
Simba song played on.
Giraffe’s long legs link kite birds,
Silken prides.
All colors chant against familiar words,
Beat drums, bring arks full load.
Gazelles leap, cheetah prowls
Till gold light pulls them to the gravest bones.
A dark side vultures in,
Sweeps with the lurch of laugh,
Hair up on its mean back,
Tongues dragged in dirt.

A toucan sycophant’s praise, mock and scold.
Protection comes in many shapes and forms.
Old scars betray their plans,
Push innocence aside,
Stampeding wildebeests in rolls of sand,
Kill Kings, send exiles from the rock.
Do not forget the stars of long dead reigns.
They watch, they see the play, play on.

Out of savanna, past the cactus hands
Jump jungles hang moss mist,
Snuff truffles, waterfalls,
Amid the river cloth filled fish
Full crocodiled, friends carry on.
Hakuna matata - Eden’s “never mind”
Until youth flowers into its new maned form,
Roars its lost patriarch, spells from reflections
Glow worms on all vines, twist tangle,
Turning holograms within the mind,
Speak back the past, remembering the strands
Rain ribbon tears.

Fantastic petals form, scent in caresses arm,
Comes home to the starved land
Where shimmering sheets slip wetness
Under sand, sucked slow as light fades,
Whirlpooled down.
Blood battled, in the end, the triumph cycles
As deceit breaks its own back,
Is eaten, and re-seeds the grass.
The rock pride climbs again,
Gazelles re-leap,
Song suns again.

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