The possibility of beauty is often raised in small interactions between people – between neighbours, strangers, relatives – through intimacy, kindness, connection.

For every news story I read or phone call I make, I pad my core with a little more beauty. The trick to survival, now more than ever, is to hold onto music, color, art, and language. Beauty is not a luxury; it’s vital—it’s how we honor what’s important even as ugliness breaks out around us.

Someone is talking
about wine. It’s cool in here.
A little girl with a yellow balloon
and a shirt to match, a pink bow and an aqua
gauze skirt, reminds my friend
of her childhood.

Beauty comes to me, first and foremost, through my eyes.  The natural world serves as my most consistent doorway to it–whether through a mackerel sky at sunset, the geometry of garden flowers, striations in stones, the hover of raptors, the myriad shapes of insects, the wind swirling grass, or light playing on water.

In the presence of a masterful painting or a line of poetry whose words rise off their meaning, I’m inspired to feel, and perhaps express, what’s most true within me.

In a story written by the Yugoslav Nobel  prize laureate  Ivo Andric, an endless battle between beauty and evil in the world is presented through interesting metaphors. Beauty is seen as a young sheep, a talented dancer, and an old wolf symbolizes evil.  One day, wandering through the woods, the sheep named Aska finds herself before an old wolf. She dances on a meadow to save her life, and the old wolf stays enchanted by the beauty of the dance.

The world needs to refigure their ideas of perception and embrace the simplicity and glory of sunshine and its reflection over letters. Beauty is in places you need to transcend to look.

The poet’s job is to awaken the imagination
to open the door to the mind
that sets you on a journey

The writer can make the smallest, the insignificant beautiful. It can be said that beauty is the skeleton of beauty. The leaf falls without anyone noticing that the abyss is there.

I have no idea what beauty is or how it might be defined. But I am intrigued by what St. Augustine said about it: “Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked.”

Beauty is resilience. It’s the revolution of the earth, the grace of the new year, the homecoming of an odyssey. It’s the edit after creation, the maturation of an idea. It’s the transformation of one thing into another, the refusal of matter to be destroyed. Beauty is a mutable moment and how we attempt, again and again, to convey it, no matter how vain the endeavor.

It was the beautifully unexpected, the shock of sudden music becoming a reality. This is what life should be filled with (although not filled too full, or its power will fade), and what all art secretly strives for, looks towards, and embodies.

What are the building blocks of the universe? Are they symmetrical, or chaotic? For how long can the material world last if it’s built with streams of chaotic particles? Why is the phi symbol so important to our world? Why do natural forms built with the golden mean incorporated into their structure seem generally pleasing to the human eye?

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.

We are constantly surrounded by beauty. The challenge is not in finding beautiful objects and conditions. The challenge is in learning to see the beauty in various objects and conditions. It is all a matter of perspective. And this is why poets and artists bring value to our lives.

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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.