The evening swan

The tiger has stripes like bamboo shadows.
Frogs are green as their lilly pads.
Lions are hard to spot in Serengeti grasses.
Moths resemble tree bark after they've alighted.

Camouflage secures life to species endangered.
All except the evening swan
whose white glows brighter when the dun dark comes.
Whose inspired poetry is as compelling as it's prose.
Gravity transformed to a rainbow's arch
holding up the bridge of the God of stars and sky.
A phoenix reborn from a funeral pyre.
Out of ash and soot rising, always rising
on the feathers of the dawn.

How like our love the evening swan
so easy for the archer to mark and shoot.
An arrow may pierce its breast but not its heart.
The evening swans "veins are filled with light,
and its heart is washed with noon."
The roots of the swan's heart are dug in deep
as the roots of the shadow over willow
that bears catkins and lives near water.
That both weeps and sings and keeps
the music and the timbre of wild things alive
though in a cloak of camouflage.