My Little Poem: Beauty
Over at Poetry for Life, we’re reading Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty” — my latest poem to learn by heart. Hopkins’ poem is also in my first book, The Joy of Poetry.
Here’s my poem about beautiful things that might not appear beautiful to everyone.
White Dwarf Star
You have dwindled in size, now only slightly
larger than the globe in my study, spinning
on an axis uncalculable. Your red fuel
now spent. Compressed electrons share
expansive space – this poem, that song,
your new haircut. You are a bee
in my china closet. I was sick then,
but I’m not sick now. What is off-limits
remains behind the orange cones.
(No yellow police tape for us.) Eerie
how a tornado chooses the front porch,
leaves the storage shed untouched, leaves
us open-mouthed at the fog we never noticed
before the storm. The musket shoots straight
as Cupid’s arrow. One chaste glance
across a ship of fools and we
burn dry, uncollapsed.
–Megan Willome
I loved this book. As soon as I finished, I began reading it again.”
—David Lee Garrison, author of Playing Bach in the D. C. Metro
