“Always be a poet, even in prose.” ~ Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), French poet
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
To Dorothy
(Untitled, photograph by Vivian Maier, 1926-2009,
American photographer, from a collection of tens of
thousands of photographs she took on the streets of
mid-century Chicago; her work was discovered when
a real estate agent found the negatives in 2007 at an
auction of boxes abandoned in storage lockers)
A poet can say “I can’t imagine life without you” so much more poignantly than can most of us.
TO DOROTHY
You are not beautiful, exactly.
You are beautiful, inexactly.
You let a weed grow by the mulberry
and a mulberry grow by the house.
So close, in the personal quiet
of a windy night, it brushes the wall
and sweeps away the day till we sleep.
A child said it, and it seemed true:
“Things that are lost are all equal.”
But it isn’t true. If I lost you,
the air wouldn’t move, nor the tree grow.
Someone would pull the weed, my flower.
The quiet wouldn’t be yours. If I lost you,
I'd have to ask the grass to let me sleep.
~ Marvin Bell, born in 1937, American poet
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a very beautiful poem of the love of two and what would be missed if one were gone. I shared it with my love and we agree it is so.
ReplyDeleteThe photgraph also speaks volumes.thank you for this special combination. Mary