Friday

24 March 2017

— A murder of crows in the yard.

Good Morning All, 

I hope you have had the experience at least once in your life of reading a poem or a paragraph and—all at once, all of a sudden, all of surprise—you are fairly shaking from the beauty not only from the sounds and the meanings of the words, but also from the beauty of how the sounds and meanings wed into one.

Emily Dickinson says it better: “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?”

Here’s what a Welshmen named Giraldus Canbrensis said about art in general in his 12th Century book Topographia Hibernia (Map of Ireland): Look more keenly at it and you will penetrate the very shrine of art. You will make out intricacies so delicate and subtle, so exact and compact, so full of knots and links, with colors so fresh and vivid, that you might say all this was the work of an angel, and not of a man.

In fact, the first time I read that quote, I got a good case of the shivers. That sentence is so well crafted you can see the Latin shining through it.

Here’s a very brief poem I cannot read without a sense of humble and abiding gratitude for language itself and for the people who can make it sing. It is by a poet who usually writes for kids. I find it a terribly, heart-breakingly sad poem, but at the same time almost impossibly beautiful in the conjoining of its sound and sense:

Little Elegy

(for a child who skipped rope)

X. J. Kennedy

 

Here lies resting, out of breath,

Out of turns, Elizabeth

Whose quicksilver toes not quite

Cleared the whirring edge of night.

 

Earth whose circles round us skim

Till they catch the lightest limb,

Shelter now Elizabeth

And for her sake trip up Death.

What always undoes me is how after the first seven lines, which are so musical as to be a skipping-rope rhyme, the speaker destroys the rhyme in the last line  so that Death does, in a way, get tripped up by the Earth, who will now shelter the little girl.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron