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Terry Savoie – Four Poems

She said that Beauty “is everlasting/ and dust is for a time.” For me she is referring to the upper case Beauty and not that beauty chased daily by hordes of Americans. How I love Ms. Moore’s ability to cut through so much with so few words.

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Lawdenmarc Decamora – Three Poems

Based on what I saw today on the reflection of tall trees on the river, there’s an Armageddon of swirling things trying to drink the water, their spreading tension the surface of claw-prints and misty roars in silver. I tried to identity them in their uniform art of consciousness—namely: feathery desks, unread papers, dried leaves, money bills, memos, pills and pillows, a falling tear, the image

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Jeanne Althouse – The Empty Road

The bark of a birch, black lines on white with intricate texture and patterns. The canopy of the full-grown oak, leaves sparkling with movement, umbrella-like protection against the weather. The blood red of the fall leaves as the Japanese maple reveals its heart.

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Vera Ignatowitsch – Three Poems

Poetry, for me, is a passionate expression of things we sense, see, know (even if not consciously), in a concentrated form that sounds like a passage of never before heard music. Beauty is fashioned from the melodies and harmonies all around us that we don’t usually listen to or hear, condensed and crystallized into something potent and also elemental.

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Sophie Paulette Jupillat – Three Compositions

Beauty is a whisper that cannot be caught; it is like trying to touch time with your bare hands. It is the universal muse who reveals herself in all Her splendor to anyone whose eyes stray from desolation and darkness. Beauty is made up of all our dreams, all our expectations, all our uniqueness, and all our imaginings of a better world.

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Todd Mercer – Five Poems

Back when my new bride and I were dating, she would respond to the mention of certain fellows by saying, “He’s such a beautiful man.” At first I thought she was uncommonly comfortable praising other men’s appearances. That was incorrect. Sometimes she’d mention a woman, similarly labeling her “A beautiful human being.”

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Judith Skillman – Five Paintings

What gives pleasure and exalts the mind and spirit, then, is nature in all its varied moods. As a painter I strive to capture scenes where light is focused in  a particularly moody way: a sunset, a cloudy Northwest day on Rattlesnake Ridge, a turbulent sea.

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Neil Ellman – Five Poems

Having studied other cultures and other times, it is apparent that beauty is a matter of culture, context and states of mind, even of economics and politics. Merely consider the 20th Century in which works by Picasso, Stravinsky and Balanchine were seen as ugly, tasteless and vulgar, and Soviet architecture was preferred by many.

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Marion Brown – Four Poems

Where verse is concerned, music is key. What a poet hears, the vernacular of the street or any other, is crafted with echoing sounds, stresses, pauses, strange words and familiar, which create an opportunity for expectation satisfied and surprise—the delight of language.

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D. R. James – Four Poems

Beauty is a quality of anything, really, that provokes in us, for whatever reason, an awestruck double-take, the prolonged or re-look, re-read, re-listen, re-touch, re-think. The “live” one ends, of course—the sunset, the concert, the intimate moment—and we often strive and contrive to experience another like it

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Becca Menon – Three Poems and a Translation

To every story,
            bliss or torment,
Beauty cries, “Brief!”
            but brings providence’ salve –
even love in grief –
            offers sacred relief.

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Chris Brauer – Surrendering to the Music

I never know what the hour will be when I emerge out of the deep recesses of my mind and return to the ‘real’ world.  Sometimes only an hour has passed and I have composed a thousand words; other times I emerge to find myself in the mid-afternoon with three or four thousand words on the page. 

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Andrea Potos – Four Poems

Though I cannot say for certain what beauty is, I know that it arrives as a recognition from within, a presence, an awe or quiet joy.  Beauty can only make us better humans, especially when we remain actively receptive to it

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Margaret Xuanyi Lu – Before the Warblers Began To Sing

Beauty is the nightingale’s soft song that echoes as the dawn draws. Beauty is the power of love; a power so strong it may potentially bind two strangers til death do them part. But most importantly, beauty is the incredibly potential of humanity.

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Wally Swist – Five Poems

Beauty is relative—however, it is also abundant and perennial. One type of beauty may diminish and morph into a deeper philosophical truth. Beauty can take the guise of morality and define the outer reaches of what it means to be fully human—to grow into that.

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Gail Tyson – Titanic Redux

I experience beauty as resonance. Dictionaries define that term as a vibration, a quality of richness or variety, and a quality of evoking response. All three alert me to beauty.

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Paul Beckman – Better Than TV

He reached out with his cane and hooked a branch with roses and carefully pulled it towards him and leaned over and smelled its fragrance. He then gently put the branch back with his cane, turned back around and continued his walk.

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Karen McPherson – Five Poems

Beauty is heavy stuff. Beauty is light.
I feel something tidal, a delicious pull
where feeling and thinking circle one another.
Beauty strikes a chord. Something resonates.
The light catches its own glancing.

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Leslie McGrath – Three Poems

I never stop being astonished by the ways we’re separated from every other human being, despite our intentions and desires, despite all our good efforts. Life seems to be a somewhat random sequence of approaches and separations, each of which is deeply compelling. Many people call this Beauty.

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Andrew Stancek – His Mother Told Him

Beauty? In the air I breathe during my daily walk, in words: “When I see the black cricket in the woodpile, in autumn, I don’t frighten her. And when I see moss grazing upon the rock, I touch her tenderly, sweet cousin.” Mary Oliver, “Moss”. And “The sound of the ocean, the wind, your own heart.” Sylvie Germain, Magnus.

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Stephen Wehr – Five Poems

Beauty is an inner and outer experience, but the two were truly written by the same hand. The outer world recreates the inner world, “making this thing other,” recalling the inner world to its original beauty, despite great brokenness.

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Bree Barkwell – Four Poems

Give the world something beautiful to connect with and the meaning and value of it changes with every angle it’s perceived from, not to mention subject to the influences of the person evaluating it and the context it is being experienced in.

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Sheikha A. – Five Poems

Beauty is in stopping to matter whether anyone believes your stories because you discover the universe has long been writing for them to happen and in all the meandering, you have somehow seen the route.

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Anton Yakovlev – Four Poems

Beauty is the flower hanging from the chandelier above the bed of the mortally ill, reminding them that eating, drinking, and being merry is not always a requirement.

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Marjorie Becker – Four Poems

The particular realm of beauty I seek in my poetry is internal, is a series of linguistic references, even configurations about human tenderness. As a poet (and even as a scholar) I work from my subconscious, one full of an array of images, events, places, faces, and relationships.

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Patricia Fargnoli – Five Poems

Beauty is in design….the curve, the spiral, the spider’s web, the dive of an owl for its prey, the ten thousand symphonies of the stars. It is in poetry, in art, in the creative force that rules the universe.

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Laurel Peterson – Four Poems

The mind may define something as beautiful, but it is the body that recognizes it and provides us with the sudden intake of breath, the moment when we look up and see what we’ve always seen in a new way. And if, in that moment, I am granted a perception that I can put into words, then maybe I will be lucky enough to pass it on as a beautiful poem.

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William Ruleman – Three Translations

Perhaps it is best to approach beauty with humility. (I say this even while having to admit that beauty often catches us unawares, as when I first heard Mahler’s Eighth Symphony or, as one who had never been an admirer of tapestries, came upon some by William Morris on display at the Cincinnati Art Museum one afternoon and was reduced to tears.) Great works of art can surprise us in this way.

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Susan Tepper – Me & Mr. Grant

Cliff, so tall, had to bend low to open the limo door. And out stepped Cary Grant! Tanned, silver-haired, older than his movies, more solid-looking; yet unmistakably Cary Grant. And, attentive. To me!

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G. Louis Heath – Three Poems

In a world rendered inchoate by divisiveness and the limitations of human faculties, the words and images the poet employs connect the reader’s mind and emotions to an experience or object in the flux of the swirling events of life. Poetry grants access and focus for a mind to experience resolution and catharsis of all that besets it on individual and macro levels.

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Bob Bradshaw – Three Poems

We don’t need to look for beauty in only the obvious places: mountains, vast landscapes, fireworks. One finds beauty in even the smallest of places, in the nuances of a voice, in the wings of insects, in the blue sparks of forget-me-nots. Who would want to leave such a world?

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Pamela Miller – Three Poems

When I write, I try to not only gaze up in wonder at the waterfalls and meteor showers but also peek beneath a few rocks to see what oddly shaped forms of beauty might be lurking under there.

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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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Inna Dulchevsky – Five Poems

“Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror.” This is an instant, a unity of my mind and my heart, when only the power of beauty is able to merge the two into one. Only beauty is able to open my own heart and make me see my own self without the mirror.  

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Steven Ostrowski – Four Poems

As long as we are at least partly receptive, when we encounter genuine beauty, in any of its forms, its power temporarily overrides our default consciousness (which is often only a rote semi-consciousness) and, for a period of time that feels halted, it reconfigures our perceptions, our emotions, our points of view, our intellect. It is as if some of the atoms of a beautiful form enter us and some of ours enter it in a transaction that creates a most personal, intimate experience.  

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Charles Wyatt – Six Poems

When I think of beauty, I think of music.  Mozart, Beethoven, Bach.  That kind of music.  Well, it’s been my day job for a long time.  If I could write a poem that does what the opening measures of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande do, I would pay myself a million bucks.  I spent fifteen years writing a poem called Goldberg-Variations that comes from the pov of a piece of music. 

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