Posts tagged "nature" — Page 3
Musee des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
~W. H. Auden
Rest!
Copper-coated copter flies with intention.
He knows just where he is headed,
no energy-bleeding, hope-wasting hither and thither.
His aim is there—
that slit of space formed by the incomplete union of two elderly deck planks.
The tiny-waisted tiny being glides inside.
Blackness welcomes him home.
Safe, safe, safe.
Rest! rest! rest!
(I know I am Nobody’s poet—And still!)
God, I want to be that wasp.
