Category: Poetry

Beauty

Grace Kishino

The flower is itself. The light is itself. The silence is itself. I am myself. All perhaps illusion, but no matter. For illusion is the shadow of reality
[Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander]

A few months ago I had a dream that I was standing on a cliff next to my home and I could see a tsunami approaching that was so high it would engulf me and my home, yet I was struck still by the beauty of the frothy bits on the top of the wave.

It felt like becoming nothing in the presence of perfect beauty – like this poem by Sappho –

The Unseen

Grace Kishino

While walking along Hastings beachfront with my nephew, I asked him “How do you know if the past and future exist if you can’t see them? Where are they?” and he replied “Don’t be such an idiot, Grace!! just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there!”

D’ye see, after allowing a little space for the light to spread, nothing resting?

Day into night, and through night into day the remote, Unseen

Eventually to be visited:

After being chased, through night, through darkness, successful in the end, the wind and sea allies;

Touching the heart

worked anew.

Made this poem using an exercise in a journal/ notebook called “THE STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST JOURNAL” by Austin Kleon. I love it! It seems to inspire and release creativity 🙂
#stealjournal

Perfect

Grace Kishino

While staying with my family in the UK this summer, I was rather taken with this translation of the Upanishads by Shree Purohit Swami and W. B. Yeats which I found on my stepdad’s book shelf. Especially the first few lines:

That is perfect. This is perfect. Perfect comes from perfect. Take perfect from perfect, the remainder is perfect.

May peace and peace and peace be everywhere.

Sometimes I find it hard to see perfection in everything, but never hard to see in my son Dan!

What do you see as perfect?

Dappled Things

Grace Kishino

When I was taking Dan to school this morning, he suddenly shouted ‘Dappled light!’ when he saw some created by the tree leaf shadows and the sun. It reminded me of one of the few poems I remember from school which I quite like –

Pied Beauty
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

img_2819