SAINT JULIAN PRESS

KEVIN MCGRATH ~ POET

 

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​F A M E
 
By
 
KEVIN MCGRATH

I – 6

 

 

Does beauty exist in water

Can it be seen in the sky

Or is it passing through the air

As light breaks into spring

When the wind is most on fire

 

Beauty goes with timeless measure

With feet unseen to living eyes

One slight human defect

Causes its transit to be undone

Upon a burning axle of days

 

Is there beauty in a child’s

Perfection of uncovered limbs

Or in glances shot between

Young men and women’s eyes

When shadow is a lucid blue

 

Beauty shows herself to those

Who do not expect to stay

Beyond the effort and the anguish

That make for life without end

On a dancing floor of this place

 

A sweet delicious comb of light

Of soft white generative tissue

In whose weightless substance

Is beauty to be briefly found

In ways that we cannot say

 

Beauty exists in movement

In every transient thing

In beauty there is slowness

Brevity lightness and

One great absence of desire

 

This is a truth transparent

Equality of how time solves

Separates and divides us from

All that is coherent here

Where beauty finds itself

Strangely wandering the world