for Heartbeat
If I said we sat in a circle
in an open air room made of stones
with tall arched windows
and night sky for a dome
and drank wine and laughed
and teased and wept,
if I said we then sang by candlelight
until the milky way
spilled into our throats
and our voices swirled like vines
that twine and tendril to climb themselves,
if I said how, when we sang our last song,
the wind rustled in the aspen
in quiet applause and then stilled
and a shooting star unspooled
its bright fleeting ribbon, well,
I would barely believe it myself
that the world could feel so full of beauty,
except I was there and felt
the night as it cradled us,
felt that vine take root, still taste
just a bit of that milky way in my thoughts
creamy, nourishing, vast.
So much of what we are missing is beauty. Here you provide it in an eloquent way. I am reminded of Richard Wilbur’s poem “Love Calls Us to Things of This World.”
Oh friend, I have been thinking so much about how beauty is part of what makes life bearable right now–little crumbs of it I follow. I think that might be tonight’s poem …
Art disappears so easily and has to be so steadfastly cultivated against the stream of negativity always hurled at it.