The sky
Wanes to night
While I
Rest on cliff’s edge
Above the serenity
Of calm waters
Allow the last vestiges
Of daylight
To dance
Their vibrant death
When I
Turn for home
And the solitude
Of a lonely highway
No taillights
But my own
No headlights
But the moon
In the rearview
All the way
To bed
Where I
Sleep the deepest
Of sleeps
The burden
For those
Who carry
No burden
Irony
In a sea
Of burdens
I drift with the flood
Of beauty in the human spirit
Even in weighty moments of need
This light
This scene
This Earth
Only we humans
Can make of this
Hell
In nature’s kill
Know instinct is integrity
In consciousness
Is born the lie
Cruelty, and malfeasance
At dawn I climb the mountain
To remind my consciousness
Of beauty and awe and goodness
Beauty in soft light
Nature’s array of sandstone
Photographer’s eye
“She is like an angel,” he says, awed
I nod my head
As her boat recedes, into the night
I check the display, hoping I caught it
It’s there, as I search for words
Transcendant
Is where I land
When neither beauty nor perfection suffice
And even the divine of angelic falls short
A word for when no word captures an experience
The light within
Too dim
To illumine
My confines
A window
Lets in
The light
Of the world
Slight
Narrow
Itself confined
To a shaft
Enough to illumine
Patterns
Which become bricks
In one wall of my
Confinement
That there is a wall
Unnerves me
But a prison of bricks
Is preferable to one of darkness
So I welcome the light
Invite its wisdom
Its insight
Ask it
Is there more here than the bricks?
A soft, warm chuckle precedes its reply
There is
You will not like much of it
Many things in the light
Seem terrifying
That is the way of life
But so too is there beauty
And love
In the light
And while terror
Is found easily enough
In the darkness
Love and beauty need light
I nodded
Contemplated for a moment
Then turned to the light
I accept this challenge
And so began
The journey to discover
Me
This is a bedraggled
Windswept spot of rock
On a far northern sea
The gales blow hard over open water
Make landfall with merciless ferocity
And there break the will of branch and limb
Leaving nought but the tenacious grass
Which cleaves to the rubble of shoreline stone
And here am I
Full face into this sunny storm
Turbulence heavy in my ears
As it ties knots in my swept back hair
I remind myself
Be supple
Like the grass
Bend with the buffeting
And I too can thrive
Even if life sometimes seems
A gale upon a bedraggled rock
There is no small victory
In the supple tenacity
Of just getting through a day
With grace and dignity
I may even find
A little peace in it
Perhaps some beauty
Like I do here
Today
On this western shore
Of Newfoundland
It becomes a familiar thing
The thing we’ve all seen
In the same way
Photographed from the same spot
And so you go there
And when you take the photograph
You stand in the same spot
And take the same photograph
And damn if it ain’t as beautiful
As you’ve been told it was all these years
As beautiful as all the photographs
Taken from the same damn spot
And so you say to yourself
Yep. Been there
Done the beautiful thing
Seen and photo’d the remarkable thing
So you leave
And there’s some time
So you go to another thing
And the other thing’s pretty cool too
But then…
Then you see something
Some new other thing
Through a window in the cool thing
So you go up to the window
To get better look at this new other thing
And it takes you a minute
‘Cause you’ve never seen this new other thing
And it’s absolutely magnificent
And you wonder, just for a second
Where it was, all along
How’d everyone miss this exquisite thing
Before you realize
It’s the beautiful thing
The Remarkable thing
Seen from a different place
And it just blows your mind
I mean
I think the beautiful remarkable thing
Is even more beautiful, more remarkable
When seen from this different place
But everyone’s hung up
On the one place
The perfect place
For seeing the beautiful remarkable thing
So that’s how everyone sees it
And, yes
This poem is a metaphor
But what’s more important
Is finally seeing the beautiful remarkable thing
As if for the very first time
Pix to Words 