The Other Side Of Beauty Poem by Sally Sandler

Before me floats a miracle in white,
shimmering like a snowfall in the frame
of my camera, incandescent light,
a peacock of a sort seldom seen.

All white feathered tail and breast and face,
a vision strutting by the camera field
and posing with a fan of Spanish lace.
I capture on my film the ethereal.

For him, peacock blue does not exist—
his beauty coming from the unexpected.
Jarring as a bolt of lightning is,
splendor causes him to be rejected

by his own, his life a world devoid
of any others, living in a canyon
empty, but for dust and white noise.
Forever he must live without companion.

The elegance to my eye—the regal grace
captured for all time in my frame
is for him a sentence and a curse.
The other side of beauty is the pain.