I found this poem by Irish poet Eamon Grennan and think it's beautiful:
Agnostic Smoke
Open daisies in the grass, stars in the sky, that half-barrel
and the birds on it, or the silvery steely slateblue skin
of a mackerel: honeycomb of spiderlines and diamonds
and inside in close-up --look!-- royal blue. Where do birds go
nights, or buff-colored heifers up to their bellies in buttercups
as they haul as if nothing the great weight of themselves
to lake edge and back, sinking beyond their bony hocks
in the boggy grass, the brushed green rushes making
a sound like raincoats? Nothing but blues of space waiting
my agnostic praise, but from my chimney, too, lord,
the smoke goes up, though this is after rapture,
and the sight of a pheasant crossing the morning garden
briskly, like a man on business, can't trigger whatever
the celebratory nerve was--it's only the eye just looking,
as a tree might look, intending nothing beyond
being there, breaking daylight into little brilliant bits
to become itself in every instant: barked, branched, alive
with leaf-light: countless its ways of being, being like that.
Eamon Grennan
Still Life with Waterfall
Graywolf Press |
