It's Poetry Friday!

[coraa]

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

-- e. e. cummings

Comments

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking about this poem the other day. It's one of cummings better known poems, but somehow (for me) never gets old.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

It's a poem that gets stuck in my head in fragments -- "carefully everywhere descending," "no one, not even the rain, has such small hands." I can never remember the whole of it all at a go, but bits of it lodge as bright images.