A Red Mist Descends

A Poem by Sel Whiteley

One of my first poems.

This sepia still of Tibet, 1959,
would be consistent
with the Tibet of a millennia past.

A father, his complexion pale
and delicate as the flakes
caught in tonight's stormy moondrifts,
mounts his horse.
He gazes to a mountainscape
of alpine flowers.

The horse gallops.
His little girl is left to scud snow,
her sable silk hair ruffled
by a breeze pregnant with salts
drifted 10,000 years before.

A cinnamon-clothed priest
still in azure meditative calm,
stares at the temple's brazen bells,
and toys with a bead
that reads Anissa.

A shaven-haired, pubescent pupil
averts his green gaze
from the candlelight-roused
chiselled Buddha to the well-thumbed,
still prayer wheel.

Over the nighttime landscape
that lays as defined as a lacquered box,
a red mist descends.