Poetry

This next poem was first read on some hay stacks. A few friends and I had gone to watch the sunrise. We set up our blankets on the hay stacks and then waited for the golden globe of light to peak over the long dark fields of morning. As we were reading this poem the sun began to peek its way over the dark fields, and then by the end it was spreading its warmth on all of us. These moments are poetry in themselves. Here is the poem:

Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond
Any experience, your eyes have their silence:
In your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
Or which I cannot touch because they are too near

Your slightest look easily will unclose me
Though I have closed myself as fingers,
You open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

Or if your wish be to close me, I and
My life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
As when the heart of this flower imagines
The snow carefully everywhere descending

Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
The power of your intense fragility: whose texture
Compels me with the colour of its countries,
Rendering death and forever with each breathing

(I do not know what it is about you that closes
And opens; only something in me understands
The voice of your eyes is deeper than all the roses)
Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

e.e.cummings