Kalos, Meaning Beautiful and Eidos, Meaning Form, by Jennifer Dorner

Kaleidoscope, by Joanie Krug (USA) 2021. Click image for artist site.

Kalos, Meaning Beautiful and Eidos, Meaning Form

The brushstrokes could be rooftops 
beneath a suggestion of clouds, 

or three simple houses facing a meadow
of chartreuse patched with India green.

Here, a bridge over a stream becomes
a footpath that lends to a grove of trees

where pink lessens the space between 
the gunmetal pines like blossoms 

urgent for spring.
Otherwise, the path leads to shadows.

A blue cascade down the margin.
Maybe a waterfall sustaining

the countless dots lining a knoll
low at the center of the frame— 

poppies perhaps— 
or a gesture of hope in advance 

of the red heavy and cornered 
along the base. Maples or fire?

This summer I explained ash 
to a child. I taught him to write lines

with a charcoal stick, sketching 
letters against a metal bin.

As the wood burned in the fire pit, 
I said the ash forms what’s yet to be, 

nature’s colours and shapes, like patterns
in a kaleidoscope waiting to be turned.

Jennifer Dorner

Jennifer Dorner's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Quarterly Review, Cirque, Clackamas Literary Review, Cloudbank, New Ohio Review, San Pedro River Review, Sugar House Review, The Inflectionist Review, Timberline Review, and other journals. In 2019, Dorner's poems placed 1st in the Willamette Writer’s Kay Snow Award for Poetry as well as 1st in two of Oregon Poetry Association's spring contests. In 2020, she was longlisted for Palette Poetry's Sappho Prize. Dorner completed her MFA at Pacific University in 2020.