finch

this is my favorite poem.

Beauty by Lawrence Raab

Is it wrong to imagine that in our lives
this or that should not have happened?
We choose to think spirit is a triumph
over all kinds of adversity.
Then we praise the spirit, praise
the hard times that make it what it has become.
This may even be true. As it is possible
to imagine the rich in their mansions
longing for the honesty of the poor.
The man with everything
looks down the barrel of his gun,
which is loneliness. And the homeless
wrapped in newspapers on the heating grates
know exactly what money will buy.
Let happiness follow if it can.
Let others argue for the purity of the cold.
Beauty cannot be as common
as all these glossy figures. And yet
there are those who are that lovely,
and who does not desire to be seen by them,
smiled at, seized and overwhelmed?
Some of us were lucky, some were not. Justice
is different, a place
where cruelties can be seen through
and then revised. So the solitary man
puts down his gun, decides he will live.
The night, after all, is calm. A moon is rising.
The great lawn sweeps off toward the sea.
Bring those perfect forms down here to us
and let their edges all be smoothed another way
so we will know that face even in the dark.
Everything that happened
happened. But you should never
have been told you weren't beautiful.

i'm thinking about doing this when i graduate. hmmmm.

random thought: i often think about the idea that everything heals with time. i often wonder if things actually heal, if you actually feel better about them, or if you just get used to the idea/concept/whatever happened.