I.

She swims, 
the water quivers to wakefulness
the surface yielding into rainbow-ripples,
encircling her like subjects around
a queen.

She walks,
tall tawny locking grasses 
flex their blades away to tip towards
the wild-bud stem-matted earth
as she cleaves the scrubland
and paws defiantly at the winds
from the cracking ice mountains.

Her ancestors’
buried roars still echo
in the caverns between tapering roots 
that web across the trailing creepers
before needling into the fleshy earth

her foremothers’ imprints lie
in some stripped out 
strips of the old forest 
scrolled around far-off branches 
of its eldest trees that only she recognizes,
with sludgy smoke billowing between rickety trunks.
 . 
Her children
preened and permed in prisons 
continents away, 
their stripes snipped out of asymmetry, 
straightened into bars that clinks
with the visitors’ fake bravado
and glints in the bug-pecked bulb light
at supper.

II. 

Far from dusk, 
sunlight clings on barks, but slips
and siphons off through unhealed wounds.
Swaying flowers on pendulum-stalks
unhinge camouflaged butterflies,
leaves wrenched off ashen branches
swirl down into the dug-out traps
as if to gauge their depth, as if to warn,
hive gassed bees pepper the pale yolk
of vanquished sun,
then haze the slipping crown
of hunching trees
 
silent songs fizz within sealed bird beaks. 

They strike back

nimbus plug up the sky-specks pitting the canopy, 
the water hole twitches, rain slops off its bank,
each stem a bed of rill, each leaf a wishing pool
the earth dissolves, 
assailing the dryness of her mate’s blood. 

Lightning sizzles the purple-bruised sky, 
the lone tigress’s emboldened profile 
on the ridge 
as she claws into this realm (where she still lives),
shadowing the realm without.