Beauty Expressed

Seeking the gift of poets
I prayed to see beauty.

So I combed the wharf and the lane,
searched the fields and the rivers,
I waded the teeming masses,

but in frustration and spite
I cried out to God that
a muse I could not discover.

For all I found was a man
haggard and worn,
his youth spent on the waves of the sea;

A woman of twenty, a body of sixty,
her slight frame riddled by drugs;

A couple stooped and old holding hands,
their love devoid of physical beauty.

Finally, I spied a harried young mother,
children in tow, her husband deployed a far.

An answer then came quiet and sweet,
“If only you’d learn the beauty of people, and nature, and things unknown to the human eye

For in extremity and struggle is the labor of living, and poetry is beauty expressed without eyes.”