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THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA

[This poem is taken from the movie "The night of the iguana". A secondary character, the blind old man that is staying in the hotel with his daughter, writes the poem as the movie goes ... He dies right after finishing his own poem.]

How calmly does the olive branch

observe the sky begin to blanch,

without a cry, without a prayer,

with no betrayal of despair!

Sometime

while night obscures the tree

the zenith of its life will be

gone, past, forever.

And from thence

a second history will commence

a chronicle no longer gold

a bargaining with mist and mold

and finally

the broken stem,

the plummeting to earth, and then

an intercourse not well designed

for beings of a golden kind,

whose native green must arch above

the earth's obscene corrupting love,

and still

the ripe fruit and the branch

observe the sky begin to blanch

without a cry, without a prayer,

with no betrayal of despair.

Oh courage! could you not as well

select a second place to dwell,

not onl in that golden tree

but in the frightened heart of me?

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