Saturday, April 7, 2007

So Beautiful It Hurts.

The irony in the poem I am about to type out for you by Gwendolyn Brooks is that it encapsulates the beauty of...snow. Yes, it is April. Yes, my insides have been screaming for the long days and flip flops and hyacinths of spring. But somehow on a day of 30 degress in April, a poem about snow brings out the phrase 'it hurts my heart." I have been criticized in the past for using these words together--people claiming that the verb needs to change; that hurt is all wrong for beauty. But I cannot. I wrote on Thursday about the longing feeling that grabs my heart...and a beautiful ache is the only way to describe it. Something that reaches so deeply into who I am or things I love that it literally does hurt.

And I love when I come across people who get that. Who have felt it, too, and don't think I'm crazy. And today, a day that I want to shove my winter coat in the garbage can, i a poet writing winter got it. I suppose it is beautiful sometimes, afterall.

Cynthia in the Snow

It SHUSHES.
It hushes
The loudness in the road.
It flitter-twitters,
And laughs away from me.
It laughs a lovely
whiteness,
And whitely whirs away,
To be
Some otherwhere,
Still white as milk or shirts.
So beautiful it hurts.

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