The Transitory Nature of Life
Wednesday, February 16, 2022
My son Joseph mentioned that in Japan, where he lives, ceramics are worth a great deal more if they are broken and then mended with gold filling. That led to me writing some lines in a Blues, as follows:
Yet the greatest thing I have to share
Is that love’s like china and oft needs repair
But if you mend each crack with melted gol
Its beauty increases for all to behold
Its beauty increases for all to behold
(Cracked China Blues)
At the heart of this is a reverence for how the transitory nature of life can be held up momentarily for inspection, while accepting the inevitable order of things.
I have been unlocking poems I wrote thirty or so years ago, refreshing and sprucing them up to meet the demands of my older eye. They deal with the same subject, though in a more direct. challenging way.
Passing
We make a mark in sand or snow to watch the tide
Or sun erase our passing tracks
We press a finger on another’s cheek
To see the soft-red imprint, dull then fade
We lie upon the hothouse summer corn
To watch the stalks rebound upon our love
We sit upon the dry stone of a grave
And dampen it with thoughts of what will be
Spectres
Four events emerge
Ghostly through the driving
Winter snow
A rabbit bobbling slow
With myxomatosis
Feeling blindly down a furrow
A dove dancing along a fence
Cooing, impotent, in the gale
A crow blunt-beaking frozen flesh
On a tree-hung corpse’s bone
Three acts
In play on nature’s stage
Conjoined
By a fourth,
An invisible trudging man