Blue, Green, Red and Purple: Pavane For A Dead Tiger
Betty Collins’s poem mourns the death of a noble creature.
go back
go back the way you came
you afternoon visitor to the zoo
this is an empty cage
there is nothing to see here now
but your own dark image
your cold shadow falling on iron bars
making sad stripes in the empty air
he is gone
he is gone to where the high grass tipped with yellow sunlight
ripples with the undulating breathing of the wind
and only if you are innocent like Mowgli
stripped to your own soft bare vulnerable skin
may you come near
and genuflect
