SPLASHES OF LIGHT

I hope you enjoy this poem by Stanley Kunitz which was included on Terry Hershey's "Sabbath Moments."  If you do any descriptive journaling or attempt poetry as I do, you may see yourself in it. 

It's thrilling to capture lovely words, maybe even lines of verse while surrounded by nature's beauty, feeling mysteriously connected to true reality.  But more often, I end up in a small, messy, and viewless room with the computer. There I assemble those vivid impressions and feelings before they're forgotten in the day's inevitable, mundane busyness.

As much as I love to write, days come and go without compulsion or ability to do it.  That's a blessing, too.  Words still weave in and out of thoughts and joys experienced in unexpected sacred moments, but remain internal and private.  It's as though they're bound up with my heartbeat, my praise, my prayer of thanks to God.

The Round
Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivulets
over the humps of the honeybees;
this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.
A curious gladness shook me.

                                                                                            Photos by Bonnie Hamilton Beuning copyright 2015

So I have shut the doors of my house,
so I have trudged downstairs to my cell,
so I am sitting in semi-dark
hunched over my desk
with nothing for a view
to tempt me
but a bloated compost heap,
steamy old stinkpile,
under my window;
and I pick my notebook up
and I start to read aloud
the still-wet words I scribbled
on the blotted page:
“Light splashed . . .”

 

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.
Stanley Kunitz