I’m sorry I’ve been such a stranger these last weeks. We’ve been trying to buy a house (and finally did), so that we would have somewhere to move at the end of the month when the woman who bought our house moves in. It’s been a crazy, stressful roller coaster of a month, but we are all set to move into transitional housing (with some lovely and delightful friends) for three weeks and then into our new (to us) home. It has five bedrooms, people. Five! After the two we’ve been living in for eight years, this place is going to feel palatial. I might get lost. But I’m willing to risk it.
In the midst of the chaos, I’ve hardly written anything. For that matter, I’ve hardly read anything. But tonight, home alone, I caught up on some blog reading, including several beautiful posts over at Lanier Ivester’s. She’s been writing this month about her time of solitude on her best beloved island. Today’s post was about the ache of beauty, how beauty sometimes stabs us with a joy so acute it hurts. It’s a beautiful post, and I encourage you all to read it.
If you do, and you read the comments, you’ll see that I took the liberty of playing with Lanier’s words and turning them into a sonnet. It’s not a terribly good sonnet. It might even be a terrible sonnet, but I’m sharing it here anyway, mostly because I had so much fun writing it. If you take nothing else away from it, take this: playing with words is good for relieving stress and returning you to your senses. I highly recommend it.
And here, without further ado, is my second-ever sonnet.
The Wound of Beauty
Across the bay, lights paint the ebb tide gold.
The Milky Way’s a swath of silver dust.
Windsong invites me, dance; breezes enfold
My limbs in warm embrace. Do I dare trust
My careworn soul to Beauty, dare to bare
My soul to ache of joy? Remind me how
To stagger under wild splendor of air
And sea and sunlight on water, to bow
My heart to a kingfisher in teal flight,
Live oaks cloaked in grave clothes of Spanish moss,
Scent of marsh grass, wild joy-cries of gulls, bright
Sky stained plum and salmon-pink, northern cross.
I welcome the sweet wound of Beauty’s clue:
These blithe beauties but house the Treasure true.
Photo by Alistair Nicol, Creative Commons via Flickr.
