Two more sonnets. Let me know what you think of them.
<b>Forest Temple</b>
A statue of an almost-human goddess
stares cat-like from a weathered pedestal.
The frailty of this creature, and her oddness,
contrast with the unmarred and classical
surroundings: images of warlike men,
pillars arrayed in strict geometry,
an altar shaped into a hexagon,
magnificent in its simplicity.
Another room, concealed beneath the altar,
contains a table hewed from blackened stone,
some crooked text, an etching of a halter
upon a human, and a single bone.
The goddess crouches in the upper room,
but this uncertain chamber is her tomb.
<b>The Veil of Nature</b>
A solitary flower draws my gaze
from the congested foliage overhead.
The blossom hardly fits among the bays
and oaks with their colossal limbs outspread.
This tangled web of branches sometimes seems
no more than an elaborate disguise,
as though the browns and interwoven greens
were merely a screen behind which Nature lies.
Moreover, when my reason is at ease,
my eyes can glimpse a form behind that veil:
I watch the branches shifting in the breeze,
as gradually the twilight starts to fail,
and see, around the leaves, an emerald gleam:
a mossy eminence; a forest’s dream.
