Poem White Page White Page Poem

Pierre Bonnard

 

 

Poem White Page White Page Poem

Poem white page white page poem

something is streaming out of a body in waves

something is beginning from the fingertips

they are starting to declare for my whole life

all the despair and the making music

something like wave after wave

that breaks on a beach

something like bringing the entire life

to this moment

the small waves bringing themselves to white paper

something like light stands up and is alive

Muriel Rukeyser

“Something like light stands up and is alive”. That hits me in the chest. “Something like wave after wave/ that breaks on a beach” – do you feel that?! This is something inexplicable, and yet, she has said it. She has shown us something we didn’t know we knew. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes me think poetry is one of the highest arts. The art we all find within ourselves, and can carry anywhere – into any circumstance. We don’t have to lug a frame into a landscape, or carry a sculpture into a battle, no, but we carry poems in our minds. Whole worlds open, anywhere, anytime. And this is the work of the poet. Rukeyser makes it sound like magic, but it is hard, hard work. “Streaming out of the body in waves”? Not bloody likely! If only. Oh, if only.

 

The Osprey

Allen W. Seaby

The Osprey

This morning
an osprey
with its narrow
black-and-white face

and its cupidinous eyes
leaned down
from a leafy tree
to look into the lake – it looked

a long time, then its powerful
shoulders punched out a little
and it fell,
it rippled down

into the water –
then it rose, carrying,
in the clips of its feet,
a slim and limber

silver fish, a scrim
of red rubies
on its flashing sides.
All of this

was wonderful
to look at,
so I simply stood there,
in the blue morning,

looking.
Then I walked away.
Beauty is my work,
but not my only work –

later,
when the fish was gone forever
and the bird was miles away,
I came back

and stood on the shore, thinking –
and if you think
thinking is a mild exercise,
beware!

I mean, I was swimming for my life –
and I was thundering this way and that way
in my shirt of feathers –
and I could not resolve anything long enough

to become one thing
except this: the imaginer.
It was inescapable
as over and over it flung me,

without pause or mercy it flung me
to both sides of the beautiful water –
to both sides
of the knife.

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver died today. I’m sad there will not be new poems from that beautiful mind.
“Beauty is my work/ but not my only work.” She is always trying to imagine what it is like to be a bit of nature. For her, nature is something you enter into, something individual and a part of understanding what it means to be human. Here, she wears a shirt of feathers while swimming for her life! – and what a beautiful way to show her sense of being many things in many elements, and as yet unresolved, or perhaps, unfinished. And is that not true of us all?  Please God, may she now indeed have pause and mercy, and may there always be beauty and the work of it both for her and us.