Your majestic form cast a shadow on the ground,
white moonlight twinkling in your eyes,
the crystal pond unmoving, a reflection of the heavens.
The skies remain clear of intruders, no clouds to laden the ebony.
Grass is billowing and rippling in the warm midnight wind,
Nature’s breath, slow and rhythmic with sleep.
Your stance is quite venerable, with unmoving grace,
you stand above the unending beds of grass,
looking on over the yonder with quiet wonder.
Eternity is enveloped in the folds of night, radiating from the auburn
of your fur, the stripeless fragments.
The stripes that label you as the majestic tiger are the slashes of the Devil’s claws,
in my mind, my sin trickling down your sides.
Sometimes I think, “If only I could see you stripeless for once, your fur clean of that black,
those rivulets of menacing ebony.”
But the sin is part of what makes you who you are,
scars of wisdom on your beautiful soul.
And now the wind is no longer a mere swishing of late night air;
it is the longing whispers of next morning, which now lay
spread-eagled on the other side of Earth, yearning to tickle
the dew-sprinkled grass, smother it in its buttery warmth.
The tiger knows this as he stands, that the mornings of twittering birds,
the warmth of the rising sun, the shafts of sunlight through the tree branches
will come once again, and so shall his nights of peaceful thought.