Your Poetry Dot Com - A Woman's Astronomy

‘As the painter paints, the poet writes.’

1
The light of morning, evening, afternoon,
The many different qualities that glow;
The sun in passing and the heaven’s moon
Alive within her, breathe wherever she goes;
This beauty speaks beyond the sense to know
As light in subtle grades evades description,
Illumination in its time and flow:
This sound of beauty balks all weak transcription:
The red of sunset, purple twilight’s diction,
The music of the world with all its lights,
Abide in her; one absolute collection -
Her house holds all of earth’s candescent sights.
The stars, the sun, the moon make dark earth bright
So her, her self, gives all who are delight.

2
As morning lights the world with silent gesture -
Without a sound the colors shift with ease;
The blue in west, in east the sun’s sweet vesture
Moves softer than a softly moving breeze.
The stars and moon begin to take repose
And dew is born like clouds upon the grasses,
The air becomes more taut for, newly rose,
The streams of light are waking all the masses.
So is she like this silent stepping dawn,
That fills the world with peace before the gears
Of work begin to turn, when just the songs
Of newly woken birds can touch the ear.
This subtle light when every day begins
Resembles most her smile, the dawn’s own twin.

3
There is no thing to think but what is known,
The way the days are now is equal to
The days of Homer, Horace and the stones
Of castles built when knightly virtues ruled;
And so the tongue can only frame a thought
Of substances and forms the mind contains -
From witnessing the things of nature, taught,
By that same force that guides the starry trains.
Nor can there be a form but finds itself
Derived from this with which the mind is dressed;
To see, to know, comes from all nature’s wealth
And she of nature’s daughters is most blessed.
To see her is to know the highest word:
Wherever’s highest thing, she should be heard.

4
There is an hour of day, when, like the bees,
The human world begins its daily acts
When, newly woken, fresh, in harmony,
All start the labor of the hive’s compact.
Each human finds a place within their world,
A task to do to make the world complete
And worlds exist in worlds, an ordered swirl,
For nature gives to all a rightful seat.
This is the time when dawn is fully born,
The circle sun begins its day’s ascent;
The light unbounded - incandescent storm -
And subtle hope fills blood, the air’s not pent.
So is her face most like this nascent hour:
A soul gets wings from her, her look gives power.

5
Time never stops, the minutes always flying;
One cannot find an equal river twice
And Hera*****us wept, there’s no denying,
But still the dawn returns - liquid from ice.
So days go by and none is like another,
Yet everyday exists within the frame
Of morning, noon, the night, sister and brother,
Eternally, as truth, one and the same;
This shape of life is Beauty’s incarnation,
Time’s pattern, like eternity’s own rose;
Though there are many petals, red carnations,
One single form gives shape to all of those.
So is she like life’s own beautiful essence
Wherever beauty is, she taught the lessons.

6
The noon, the distant noon, the sun’s far peak,
Like Friedrich saw the noon with Dionysus;
The highest point, a word that each mouth seeks:
The shape to frame the soul’s ecstatic crisis.
Each day the sun awakes to ancient labor;
To climb the sky, from which the whole earth lives;
To grant to every plant and being savor,
Transfusing all the air with beams it gives;
Nor can the charity of this bright creature
Be stunted, stopped, refrained, though clouds transgress:
From its own soul, effulgence is its feature,
As stones are hard and angel are called blessed.
This noon-tide sun is like her happy mind -
The rays of her fill souls with the divine.

7
The Christian, Freud, the Chinese, each one sees
The twain of life described in day and night,
And all of earth, each mountain, every sea,
Is rolled between the male and female sights;
And still a man transfixed and filled with woman
Transforms her into everything that is -
The fire brooks no challenge, right or sin,
This is the way it is and’s always been.
One and one story causes generations -
Of all the peoples, knights knew this the best -
No Beatrice, no Comedy’s creation;
No Europe, no America, sans the quest.
In this small set of sonnets she’s the heavens,
For next to her my self is dark, unleavened;

As reason is the measure of the act -
So no higher cause exists above her fact.

8
When stars are gathered in infinity
And night encloses earth in sleep’s embrace,
The flowers curl into themselves, the scenes
Of earthly business, cities, stop the race.
No highway traffic hits the ear with madness,
No thought of business warps the silent mind,
A quietness begins settle, gladness
Is like a softness raining from the sky.
The stars have always filled the soul with wonder;
The mind goes off into the distant deeps,
The sky is laid with diamonds, and from under
This spangled cloth the spirit wakes in dreams.
The night with whitest stars beyond accounting,
Resembles most her graces, past all counting.

9
And when the moon is rounded to its coin
And shines too bright for stars to find a place,
The earth is lit with beauty’s candle, joined
By silver light shed from that mystic face;
For when the moon in fullness spreads her beams,
Each leaf of plant and every flower’s petal,
Each eye of waking human thereat seems
Alchemically transformed to beauty’s metal.
The moonlit world’s a paradise of muses:
A music softer and more subtly
Flies through the earth, the soul’s untended uses
Awaken - now the painter’s hand is free.
The moon, her rays, give beauty to all things
So her, her ways, cause joy in souls to ring.

10
The earth has always felt illumination,
Transmitting down from bodies from above;
All creatures born are born in this sensation,
No thing alive but feels the force of love.
And whether woman-woman, man to man,
Love’s movement leads each soul toward the good -
Destructive laws will never understand:
They seek to soak the fire in the wood.
As stars and moon and sun are equal forms
Of love’s impulse to animate, to live,
So from her beauty, I, a mirror born,
In these small sonnets, give back what she gives.
She is the stars, the sun and all the moon -
Like earth deprived of these, no her, I’m doomed.

This poem is Copyright Â© Socreights