This world is filled with sweet music:
Spring drifts in
On tiny waves and buds, trees
By a quiet lake, grass stalks moving
Slowly, down by the ground
Which I stroll over, along the lake's shore:
Little pieces of beauty to feel,
Or perhaps I just want to steal
A little time, letting life come in to me.
A violet; it hangs, in its world, purpley
On a green stem, on a sheer bank
Out over the water waves—
Things seem to have a meaning
When they don't waste their beauty
On dull and still, empty
Lands of more beauty with no eyes—
Beautiful music plays night and day
And the world has no listeners.
What if the world passed away someday
And no one, no eyes, had seen these days,
These multi-happy times of fragrant light
That I see now and here?
Better that I never had lived or seen
Than to lose my springs, or their memory,
In some future year.
But I cannot believe this—
My heart says to me
That even should I lose
The dream of beauty
In a future life's cup filled with horror,
The despair of a stifled soul,
Forever cramped in a hell
Of my own devising, fled to death
(God grant that last repose)—
Still, it will be something then
To have spent a few brief moments
Watching a spring—
And if it gush out in blossoms
Letting my heart gush out with it:
Now, feel the sweet wing of youth sweep over me,
Remember the wide sky of white and blue,
Birds halting in a warbled song
To sing one clear, momentary note of spring
As life, my life, deepens, thickens
—It were better to have seen it once—
—This life was here—
Perhaps, it will still be here when I have gone,
The green and brown and shades between
And red-dappled birds winging over a lake
That says to a man-world of sorrow
And pain for the absence of care:
The dream-lived beauty can be loved
But you must wander down to a lake first.
I have. I go back now
To the world of thinking about
When there will be beauty.
But hidden away, in a corner of possibility,
Lies a spring day and a memory,
Which fleeting into a winter eventually,
To storms or machines or blood,
Yet still held these pieces,
Waves, birds, buds, violet stalks
Together as a beauty that once was today
For this briefest fraction of time's span.
—jim sloman, Spring 1962
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