Half Finished Rainbow

The Broken Rainbow clung to the sky like a psychedelic capital

On a dead Greek column somewhat waxed and solemn

Vexed at its threadbare margins, where the harbinger of doom

The weathers gloom, of a lead like grey

Had over stayed, for a hundred resting heartbeats.

No pot of gold, but maybe bronze, or copper

Where it had come a cropper

The clouds after all, had played their opening gambit,

Heavy, and backed up all the way

To the tops of old Ilkley Moor.

The sunlight had refracted at the divine angles.

Conditions just right, and yet something,

In the hidden majesty of pointless nature,

That, even in its lessons of drab mechanics

Owns an edge of the sublime in every lowly working,

Had nonetheless failed.

Above me hung a half dead idea

In Newton’s vast mad mind.

Perhaps a shade or two was missing-

Indigo, violet

So alike who would miss one or the other?

I admit I would lament the loss of the red burning parrot tail,

Seemingly caught in a spectral updraft.

The frisky fellow clutching the banana yellow,

While the curved blue/green canopy of paradise

Barely held its own below, on soaring thermals.

Alas. In another heartbeat, synced to the weary blink,

Everything, had changed. Fade. No one remembers

When a rainbow dies

when the pack shuffles

When the wings rustle.

More rain, it seems, is on its way.