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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84
Jul 17, 20221 min read

A Poem and Picture Reminding Us Not to Abandon Hope in This Awful Stretch of Torturous Heat


Anyway, since I do seem to be stuck in a phase of writing short poems about Nature and its various scenes and faces, I offer today a poem that I started a few years ago that was inspired by a hike that Kellie and I took from Gunner Pool to Barkshed back in January of 2020. I had never returned to the poem since then, but I looked at the picture posted above a few days ago, found the poem, and finished it in a about an hour. I revised it just now before posting it. Kellie said, when she read it, that it is "a quintessential Michael Thomas poem." I suppose there are worse things to be known for than writing little nature poems, songs, and scenes in formal and informal rhythmic verse. Of course, I don't think that I am known for it, really. So...I guess it is nice to know that I have a quintessence. Hooray for quintessence! Read the poem aloud and feel the coolness of it. Enjoy!


Order in Motion


The wind washes over a stone-strewn hill,

Chasing shadows through slender swaying pines,

Kicking up whispers in crackly brown leaves,

And whistling across the prickly pears’ tines.

The full-needled cedar quakes in the breeze.

The leafless oak rattles, clatters, and clacks.

A disturbed spring like liquid diamonds shines,

Dispersing the peak’s eclipse stubborn blacks.

Ghostly steam rises wraith-like and dissolves

On hoary faces of gray sandstone cliffs.

A cheeky chipmunk wonders what’s about,

So she peeks out and snatches a few sniffs.

In this windswept forest, stippled and striped,

Infused with a solar resurrection,

Only I and the stones seem to be still

Or to move without any direction.

Comments

I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

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