photosynthesis

Second doppler poem! I'm gonna offset the alternating lines in this one so it's easier to see the two distinct poems within the poem. Here the "blueshift" perspective (read alternating lines from beginning to end) is that of a forest absorbing the light of the sun and using that energy to transform itself. The "redshift" perspective is the light of the sun being captured by a forest and finding itself totally consumed as a result of living processes. I finally figured out a regular rhyme pattern that works for a doppler poem. Fiendishly difficult, but it helped a lot when I get stuck, writing it outward from the center, to have a rhyme-word to draw out the next equal but opposite image-concept in the transformation process.



as rock's a molten planet's skin
     so forests are the way life found
to harness all of sunlight's toil
     the sun's rays stripped of every tone
its lush growth captures, winnows thin
     through withered husks heaped up in mounds
strands stick like honey, glide like oil
     gouge trenches out between hard stones
what sky rains down, the earth drinks in
     strip broken rootlets from dry ground
sink fingers into cool wet soil
     earth shrugs off flesh, sky scrapes clean bones
plow furrows where new life begins
     dust, windswept, granulate, unbound
as delicate fresh furls uncoil
     where once white naked light had shone
they give the rainbow back again
     absorb the spectrum up and down
life cools light; brings itself to boil
     to make stars' radiance its own