this (let's remember) day

Samantha Keely Smith, "Surfacing"

this (let's remember) day died again and
again; whose golden,crimson dooms conceive

an oceaning abyss of orange dream

larger than sky times earth; a flame beyond
soul immemorial forevering am --
and as collapsing that grey mind by wave
doom disappeared,out of perhaps (who knows?)

eternity floated a blossoming


e.e. cummings

I sometimes try to puzzle cummings poems out. But most of the time I see images and a sense of something for which the poem is the closest thing to naming. Something in me says "Yes! That's it!" and scrambles to hold on to the beauty that slips out of my mind so quickly. I have to read the poem over and over to grasp it again. This one is a vivid contrast between falling, dying, collapsing, grey waves of doom, and the crimson flame of that cyclical (again and again) extinguishing - but look - something else, something eternal (not cyclical, eternal) - a bloom, something new, something born from all this, a flowering, growing, at the beginning of its strength. It seems like hope to me.