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.”
About this poem
In my career I can tend to become melancholy when I think about people struggling in the world. However, I have over the years learned to see the beauty in the vicissitudes of life. I recognize that we are all a work in progress and that labor is beautiful on it's own way.
Submitted by GCTHOMAS on January 11, 2024
- 51 sec read
- 7 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | XA XXX XXB XXA AX XA BX XX X |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 794 |
Words | 172 |
Stanzas | 9 |
Stanza Lengths | 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 1 |
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"Beauty Expressed" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 13 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/178477/beauty-expressed>.
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