Category: Poetry

It is a transient intimacy with truth, when the layers of life are exposed, revealed in a completed majesty. It is a fleeting experience, a halt in existence that our temporal selves cannot maintain. It arrives unexpectedly, when looking at the face of a child, an old person’s hands, an animal’s tenderness to another outside of its kind.

Often it is the curve of a line in one corner of painting that is otherwise unremarkable. Always it is the light in the eyes of the woman I have loved for forty years. It is too easy to get lost in big ambitions that lead you away from beauty.

Flickering through the poem is a kind of transformative light, often quite literally light, at different times of day, shining on every place

It is a sense of peace. It is feeling my hair getting messed up in the wind at the beach. It is the sputtering of raindrops on a sunny day. It is the crackling of a fire. It is being at the zoo wrapped in the magnificence of animals whose spirits are entwined with mine. It is the childish delight of snowflakes on my tongue.

Beauty is getting out of bed every morning in a sun-speckled house smells of bacon, coffee that laces with whisky and a social strategy around my laptop that fends off a fur-shedding dog, busy-fingered children and a wryly pragmatic husband.