Through a Lens of Beauty

 

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Poetry taught me to pay attention,

to notice the small beauties: birdsong,

a furry bee asleep inside a blossom, the way

 mist swirls around the shoulders of the island

like a cape worn by a dowager, who has watched

the harbour for a thousand years.

It causes me to notice things: a heron perched

atop a scrag, the scrag itself, bark-worn and

grooved by time, the way my own face

wears lines these days, looking more like

my grandmother than me.

Poetry tenderized me, taking me from euphoric

and optimistic to a deeper place that sees the beauty

through a prism of sorrow, the heartbreak

of human folly turning towns into war zones,
clearcutting forests, driving other beings
to extinction, heating the earth to a boiling point,
blind to our shared peril.
.

Poetry attuned me to the world so deeply

that my eyes leak tears, all the stored tears

of my lifetime, which over-filled my heart,

now released by loss, by love and pain,

by orphaned whale calves and starving children
and times that will never,
can never, come again.

Poetry opened my eyes which can never, now,

be closed. It made me see the whole of life,

but through a lens of beauty: a planet struggling

to survive, a world that strives to live, as tenuously

as a fly caught in a spider web that notices,

as it tries in vain to unstick its legs, how beautiful 

the morning dew is, and tips its head to drink.