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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 5, 20231 min read

A Short Poem About Sunrises and a Few Pictures of Them


So...for the last few weeks, Kellie and I have been getting up around 5:30 AM to go on our daily walks with our dog Luna. Being out that early allows us to see plenty of gorgeous sunrises, and both Kellie and I try to capture those sunrises in photographs. We do have some good ones, maybe even some great ones, but the pictures tend to fall well short of what we were actually looking at as we saw them.

Anyway, I have been wanting to write a poem about the inability to adequately capture sunrises, and the project has been a bust. Today, as I was reading Byron's Don Juan, I thought, "I will just randomly take one of his verses (Spenserian stanzas, by the way) put the last words of his lines down and write to them." I did. I am not sure that it is exactly what I wanted, but perhaps it will get the creative juices flowing. Here is the poem and a couple more pictures of sunrises.

Capturing the Sunrise

(Inspired by words of Byron)


No perfect likeness can a picture make,

Nor artist illustrate a scene so fair

As when Aurora stirs from her night’s break

And frames the mountain top with her wild hair.

Her lovers, then, will know that she’s awake

Yet all who think to woo her will but err,

For trying to hold her essence is as silly

As gilding gold on petals of a lily.





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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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