Month: October 2017

Sunil Sharma – Three Poems

For me, beauty is situated in a dancing flower on a lonely highway… in the prancing steps of a child from a deprived background, and, the tired eyes of a terminal patient that light up, after seeing a lost kinsman, at the bedside.

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Diana Woodcock – Five Poems

Throughout the nearly fourteen years that I have lived on the fringe of the Arabian Desert, I have tried to carefully investigate and cultivate a connection to it. The desert’s ascetic beauty and wonder have humbled me in a way I never could have imagined.

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Mark Danowsky – Five Poems

After leaving the world of “Pastoral,” it seems plausible that we’re supposed to understand vanity is not a game we can win; however, it’s “of vast import to the nation” that we are vigilant about checking in with ourselves to avoid pitfalls in our concept of what is beautiful.

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Kate Bernadette Benedict – Four Poems

In poetry, the effective image–even if it’s piercing, even if it describes something eerie or ugly—can be a beautiful image. And when I think about it, this is the type of image I strive for in my poetry. The exacting image. The specific image. The ringing image. The stinging image, sometimes “cooked” and sometimes “raw.” Let’s call it beautiful.

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Julia Caroline Knowlton – Six Poems

Defining beauty is an impossible task, doomed from the start. This is because the very moment of its apprehension defies comprehension. In the same instant when I perceive, with my senses, the rustle of a red leaf, notes from a cello, or a body’s cello-like perfection, the possibility of any complete understanding disappears.

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Clif Mason – Four Selfies

Beauty is always fresh and fantastical, even when the subject is ordinary and familiar. We discover beauty if what is known becomes strange—as phantasmagorical as if we had never seen it before. The unwonted is wanted. Beauty may be ordered and symmetrical or it may be angular, jagged, and asymmetrical.

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Martin Willitts Jr – Five Poems

I work in an organic garden where I work closely with small beneficial insects like ladybugs, lacewings, praying mantis, and worms, companion plants such as marigolds, and composting. Since I work with seed and save generations of seeds, I try to work with the balance of nature.

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G.F. Boyer – Poems and Photographs

Beauty is delicious and healing, a feast for the eyes or the heart or the mind. One of my favorite verses from the King James version of the Bible reads, “And the glorious beauty, which is on the head of the fat valley, shall be a fading flower, and as the hasty fruit before the summer; which when he that looketh upon it seeth, while it is yet in his hand he eateth it up.”—Isaiah 28:4

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Sandra Arnold – Two Stories

Beauty lies in the transformative power of words. I love the way the rhythm, musicality and juxtaposition of words on a page can ignite all five senses and create whole worlds in the mind.

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Don Mager – Five Poems

As I have gotten older my notions of beauty have drifted away from aesthetic universals.  Beauty for me now is simple ravishment.  A sudden unexpected gasp of surrender to a sense-based awareness, often visual but also tactile, aural and even olfactory.

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Trivarna Hariharan – Five Poems

The world of nature is abundantly giving and beautiful. It is also pure and liberating. I believe that beauty lies in the ability to transact with our natural world as kindly and peacefully as possible. It is also about being grateful for all it offers us, treating it with dignity and respect. 

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Rajnish Mishra – Five Poems

Miss you poet Ali, homeless, exile.
Never met you the person, but met the poet
of Kashmir, pain, and loss.
Yearning for a time and a place that never could be;
never yours again.

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Neil Creighton – Three Poems

…but each simple, commonplace moment / transformed, miraculously new, / never truly seen before, / now shouting glory to ears / that had been deaf, / beauty to eyes / that had been blind.

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Jack B. Bedell – Four Poems

My poems are tributes to that beauty, archives to hold on to it as long as I can. Sometimes those moments hit me in the chest like heart punches; sometimes they whisper in my ear with sounds just like my mother’s voice during bedtime stories. It’s my responsibility as a writer to get them all down as often and as accurately as possible so they share well, and for lifetimes.

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Janette Schafer – Four Poems

I don’t always know what beauty looks like, but I do know what it feels like.  It’s the swelling in my chest, the unexpected holding of my breath, the attention I hold in my eyes and my spine, the whisper and shimmer of the divine on my skin.  It inspires, challenges, disrupts.  It holds you hostage and then sets you free.  

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Hunter Joslin – The Ocotillo Was No More

Beauty is harmony, and balance. It is in things seen and unseen, and it is always in light and freedom. You see beauty in specks of dust floating in the air, swirling around us; you see it in a falling leaf, spiraling to the ground, and in the first crocuses of spring.

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Kelly Cherry – Four Poems

For me, depth of thought is an essential component of any creative art that is beautiful. I also love the beauty of mathematics and science, especially physics (insects and insides I find less attractive but I am glad that others study them). I love the depth of thought in great books and meaningful visual art. Why do I want depth of thought? Because I think.

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Jenny Wong – Zeb

Beauty comes in moments, when something seen or heard or felt has the power to expand the spaces between heartbeats, make the inhale or exhale of breath be forgotten.  Beauty lives in those pauses. There are no internal monologues, critical eyes, or external distractions.  In the end everything else is still. 

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Tobi Alfier – Five Poems

When my son was in his first year of college, on the weekends he cooked for his roommates. Two of them are vegetarian. Besides going to classes, doing his homework, playing Final Fantasy 15 whenever he could, he researched vegetarian meals, cooked for them and baked bread. His heart was so full when he made them happy. I am so proud. My arms are around all of them. That is beauty to me.

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Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler – Three Poems

Poetry is the activity of making the medium and the membrane resound harmoniously. The best way to do that is to talk about what words really mean, so we can watch them meaning, in a way we don’t care to do when we use them casually.

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Ruth Asch – The Box

Beauty changes you, if only for a subtle moment. It strengthens the pulse, gathers and releases breath, expands the heart, glows in the mind. Unless you shut it out, beauty engages you in a relationship…

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Olga Dugan – Three Poems

Beauty, like poetry, is the whisper of gold through trees; buildings dipped in golden-orange, burnt sienna, and facing west; the underwater blue of after-day air, and the physics of light God has lent to us in order to describe it. Beauty lies in the integrity of the poor, in the sustaining conversation of a wounded healer.

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Karen Greenbaum-Maya – Five Photographs

…beauty is recompense for being human in the face of God’s love, which surpasses my little understanding. Beauty shows the connection between inside and outside, the possibility of human wholeness in the indifferent world…

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Joe Cottonwood – Four Poems

Beauty is of life in every corner, wet cells sucking nourishment, giving birth, teeming through every grain of earth. We drink water once swallowed by Jesus, breathe atoms once blown by Buddha, share the light of stars with unknown beings on undiscovered planets. Of this light, this water and air, this story without begin, without end, of this universe of countless souls is beauty.

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Rita Quillen – Two Poems

Beauty is the bringing together of perfect shape, color, texture, sound, thought and feeling, all meeting in the same spot at the same time in such a way as to make us forget everything ugly, evil and sad for at least a few moments. It is God’s antidote to tragedy and heartbreak, a hedge against life’s bad bets.

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Paul Ilechko – Five Poems

it seems to me that harmony of mind is the necessary aspect for the creation of beauty. Perhaps harmony is in fact the underlying element that defines what is beautiful. Perhaps, beauty is when the elements that make up the whole are in balance with each other. 

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Barbara E. Young – Five Poems

I’m not sure what I think big-B Beauty is. Doubt there’s a vault outside of the universe with all the Ideals sitting around sipping ideal beverages. Beautiful, though, is a lot like funny. It knocks you off what you always assumed was balance, and–for you if not for the rest of the world–it never gets old.

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Ruth Bavetta – Five Poems

I have always been fascinated by the juxtaposition of beauty and danger—aspects of life which often collide or intertwine. When I was a practicing artist my work often explored this subject. For several years I devoted much of my time to a series of still lifes mingling the beauty of such things as flowers, fish, or pearls with the beauty of broken glass which reflects light and threatens anyone who touches it.

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Norbert Kovacs – The Long Lake

Nature is high on my list of beautiful things. I love exploring the woods and walking by water, rivers, streams, lakes. I have seen, unfortunately, that many people, preoccupied with the anxieties that modern life imposes on us, fail to appreciate the beauty in natural spaces

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Nelly Sanchez – Six Collages

Beauty, it’s Eternity glanced. It’s the opposites meeting, it’s the chance meetings. It’s Shadow and Light. It’s Symbols language, it’s Silence. Beauty remains in all things. It’s the covered pomegranate seed : a ruby under the rind.  

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Anne Whitehouse – Four Poems

Beyond what we see and hear and feel and what we know is something greater than human formulas can account for. This, for me, is the true subject of poetry, as close to us as a blade of grass, yet essentially unknowable.

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