Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday is a cool website I recently discovered.  Every Friday there is a new word on the website.  During the next week people of any skill level send in their entries based on that word.  I think this is an awesome  concept, and I have included my entry for this week, "bicycle," here.

The Danger of Caging Beauty

This poem is about the sense of longing I get when I see something really beautiful.  That may lead me to take incessant pictures of a sunset when I know they will never do it justice.  It may also lead me to kiss a baby's face off or run through a perfect field of snow just to get at it although I know very well that I am only ruining it.  It is about the elusiveness of beauty, and also the danger of trying to capture it.  The second one (which I wrote first) is similar, but has quite a different tone.

Lusting for Beauty

I don't approve of caging beauty

As mankind likes to do

They press flowers, and carry home the ocean in a jar

They do not know that flowers fade

When crushed by heartless paper

They forget the ocean is not wild, is not blue, imprisoned

Then when they see the beauty gone

They feel betrayed, they know not why

They do not know that beauty owned is beauty gone away

'Tis like the seagulls and the birds

That let us watch them play

But when we try to grab at them they flee from us forever

A foolish man thinks he is master

Of the world he lives in

And when his mastered beauty pales he doubts that it was there

He does not know that he destroys

That which he desires to save

He wants so much to own the world that he forgets to love it

A man who owns a woman

Loves her not; she is obtained

But when they do not own, but have, their joy can last forever

Praises be that those who could

"Just eat a baby up"

Have the good sense not to; for they'd kill joy trying to find it

The man who had the golden goose

Had riches day by day

But lusting for it all at once his wealth was done away

To Elusiveness

What art thou?  Thou art a cherry blossom, a cricket’s song, a sky.

Where art thou?   Thou art in laughter, in heaven, on blades of grass bedewed

Who can understand an infant in arms, asleep?

Who can recall the wild ecstasy of rain and thunder that make a tempest of the night?

Thou art the poet’s muse

Lives have dwindled, and lives have grown

In trying to capture thee

Cruel and coy beauty, why can we not hold thee?

None may manufacture thee

Oh, highest degree of sacrilege!

Thou sprite of the morning, thou fairy of the night

Plucking thy petals cannot make us understand

Thou art free; we are thy slaves, oh Beauty

Though we seek to put thee in a cage,

We are led along, toiling and hunting after thee

But we learn happiness from glimpses of thy perfection.