If I could capture the sky, the universe
for you, Sean, I would.
Now, I don't have to.
It's already yours,
and some day
it will be mine, too.
To be able to swim through the skies
and throughout the universe,
known or not ~ now that's living!
Silver that's really touching that you caught a muse, thanks for sharing that. Hope you have many more "in there"
.
This goes out to you and Charlie and in hopes that everyone here can catch such a muse from that great Monty-Hall-in-the-sky ... there's a poem in everyone ... just gotta relax and let the words come ... let the bitter and the sweet collide and express with as one-sided a love stick as ya' gots
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The flute lets fly a note … a bell rings clear … a bow is drawn across a single string
The air vibrates … ups and downs, highs and lows … cycles of what embraces us always
The sound caresses the ears
A hug for the heart from outside
But the poet is an instrument of a uniquely different kind
Billions of years in the crafting
Whole civilizations have been sacrificed … entire races of people thrown to the wind … cities, nations … burned.
Just so that the words can be let fly
Just so that we could be here to hear them.
Here and now.
A guitar is six strings a few dozen pieces of shaped wood and a few ounces of steel
And yet the soundtrack of our lives belts out from it
The rhythms sway us
The leads, like a voice in passion, pull the emotions from deep inside of us
Without the scaffolding of the axe the melodies and the lyrics would seem naked and alone
And a poet? A few gallons of water? A few grams of salt and iron?
Try, more likely counting the generations
The thousands of loves that lived before
An unbroken chain of prosaic survival salted with blinding points of passion, moments of ecstasy
Generations of dashed expectations, broken dreams and unexpected discoveries that twist and wend our path beyond our wildest imagination.
Yes the poet is the most complex of instruments
It’s not the cities that muse her
It’s not the nations that stir him
A poet transmutes close and private pain into the sublime
The harsh inevitability of change and the cruel vagaries of the world are spoken back
softly
wistfully
gently
lovingly
And are unrecognizable in their poignant re-expression
The sound is not sweet, not bittersweet but profound
Profound and still
The renderings of the small picture, of the personal love
Attachment reconfigured into its opposite … but can such a gift truly be said to have an opposite if received openly?
The symphony conspires to amaze us
Regals us with a complex intertwining of the winds, the reeds, the brass and the strings
Thunders out to us in crescendo and climax
Humbles the audience in our singularity with the power of gestalt
The voice of the poet, in contrast is swept on a lonely wind
The faint and fading sound embraces our being
Flows through us
Into us
Drawing us closer to the center of that being
The power of this embrace
Be it from a single poets faint voice
Puts small the combined amplification of a thousand orchestras
Renders them as silent as a dark mountain night
That voice, that finest most complex of instruments
There can be a pointing to the source of what animates it
But one finds no direction in the pointing
Or all of them
The breath that flows through the instrument of the poet
Comes from nowhere
Comes from everywhere
And belongs to all of us
.
