Beauty is when you land upright, especially if you are doing something like a figure skating jump.

What is this light?
I do not know. I do not get it right,
yet here’s the world. And here I am, and you? 

It seems to me that beauty exists when any being most lucidly expresses its own life-magnifying nature.

I have an interest in seeking beauty everywhere, and I charge myself with infusing the beautiful into words, braiding it into rhythm and rhyme, and I strive to make choices with beauty in mind.

Beauty occurs in sudden relationships: daylight from two windows falling differently on two sides of a face at once, an adjective from childish things cropping up in a phrase that would otherwise be too full of mourning, an arm in clay with a bent elbow I tilt or extend just enough to finally embrace its atmosphere.

Perhaps it’s easiest to say this — There are stones, bricks, metal and mountains. There is the great volume of space around these things. And there is how light shines down upon these things, warming them, making even the hardest surfaces shimmer.

What is peripheral is
              often not even what is considered,
                            but what passes just beyond
                                          our vision may momentarily

flutter there and be so enchanting
              that it offers a revelation as to
                            why butterflies are emblematic
                                          of the evanescent. 

The notes fall on our ears like petals to the earth,

And sound waves like the skirts of silver seas

Send rippling glassy swells through listeners’ souls –

As a poet who had studied under Robert Lowell and Archibald MacLeish, David Berman shared his impeccably beautiful formal verse with the Powows, but kept his darker, often free verse poems, in his notebooks.

On the horizon, just over the tops of the yellow, red, and orange autumn woods, the clouds pile up slowly into the sky. It’s as if you were seeing these things for the first time.

Beauty is the lever which moves the soul — to action or reflection, to laughter or to tears, to passion or compassion, in company or in solitude.

I fall in love with the art of writing poetry over and over again.

1963.
The year some French
Took too literally
Baudlaire,
And his poem, “The Cat”:

Félicette
Body electric,
Name ironic.
With ceremony,
Flung into space.

beauty is profane. 
bursting through, it serves no other, vital for itself. and self as whole, and wholly beautiful. rough and wild, tender, true.

Beauty is multifaceted, and in being so, reaches and connects to an individual in a variety of ways and channels. It’s what keeps us thinking.

rays of sun wrap the
horizon in orange ribbon—
gifting us the day

I do think it’s beautiful when my pen has been circling a subject looking for a way in, and finds it; when I’ve been looking for something as perfect as an egg, and I find that, too. Beautiful.

It may be in the sky, trees, flowers, wind or waves, and it is often fleeting. It can also be permanent, such as in great works of art, architecture, or cultural creations from around the world.

I find many examples of beauty in the surrounding nature, like the monkeys that gather in my garden, or the kingfisher, with a blue plumage, waiting for a lone fish, and the peacocks, who run havoc near the airport, not letting Argus blink even once.

It’s hearing birds sing on a clear day. It’s seeing couples dance to their favorite songs. It’s seeing a bride and groom say I do on the altar. Beauty lies everywhere.

Jane Blanchard – Two Poems Eclipse You recognized another chance To witness quite a...