Borealis

They battled…
Flashes lit up the darkness of the night…
Howls and shrieks and the blaring trumpets shattered the stillness,
Though scarcely heard so far below.

No room or place for tactics or strategy;
No flanking movements…
No lovely high ground,
No field of advantage,
Straight out head on clash, weapon upon weapon,
Brutal frontal assault…
One upon another…

Slowly the thrust of battle shifted…
Higher, higher, higher the warring armies ascended…
The clash of and flash of light faded,
And the darkness again ruled the night.
Until dawn broke across the eastern sky…

J. William Newcomer Copyright © December, 2014

doppelgänger

 I sit there idly in the van
As it slowly moves through the brushes
And water and rub-a-dubs and soap.
So as we come off the rinse
Into the fiercely blowing drying blasts of air,
I look to my left into the wall sized mirror
In which van and I are reflected. 

Startled I am to see myself there
As if in some philotic reflection of
 Myself in another universe,
 Or non-dimension outside of any universe.
I nod greeting to myself and
Wonder in our nodding to ourself,
If we could reach across the separation,
What would we do to one another?

 Copyright © 2014 by J. William Newcomer;  All rights reserved.

And God Made the Rhinos

Could it possible be,
Far out in the universe deep,
In some obscure unknown corner
Of the depths of space unseen;
Could there be a star out there
In some unknown far galaxy,
With a planet going around said star
In an orbital distance mean,
That upon said planet's surface
A Rhino species could be?

And intelligent creatures they,
In their own peculiar way,
With civilization and trade
And cities and towns arrayed.

Bipeds they would be,
Standing upright on two feet,
With horn upon the forehead
Between the eyes with which they see.

What stories they would tell
Of Rhino wars and dangerous deeds,
Of Rhino loves lost and won,
What epic tales they would weave.

Could it be in that deep vastness
Beyond the outer space we see,
In some small corner of the Universe
The Rhinos live and love and dream?

(Copyright © October, 2010. All rights reserved.)

Christus Apollo (Excerpt)

In some far universal Deep
Did He tred Space
And visit worlds beyond our blood-warm dreaming?
Did He come down on lonely shore by sea
Not unlike Galilee
And are there Mangers on far worlds that know His light?
And Virgins?
Sweet pronouncements?
Annumciations? Visitations from angelic hosts?
nd, shivring vast light among ten billion lights,
Was there some Star much like the star at Bethlehem
That struck the sight with awe and revelation
Upon a cold and most strange morn?

On worlds gone wandering and lost from this
Did Wise Men gather in the dawn
In cloudy steams of Beast
Within a place of straw now quickened to a Shrine
To look upon a stranger Child than ours?

How many stars of Bethlehem burnt bright
Beyond Orion or Centauri's arc?
How many miracles of birth all innocent
Have blessed those worlds?

Excerpt from "Christus Apollo", I Sing The Body Electric by Ray Bradbury (1969)