Snowflake in the Sun

 

“He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity's sun rise.”

― William Blake

When I read my latest poem to my beloved husband John, he recited back to me these lines from Blake's Songs of Innocence, reminding me of surrender and its power to open the space for new life. Then I found the Pixabay.com site on the Internet, one that features snowflake images that can be used without charge when combined with a development of artistic form. I figure that words fit that requirement. Still in a quandary over surrender I wrote my poem "Snowflake in the Sun." I wrote it on the day I learned that John Schottler had died. He was the husband of my best friend in high school--Georgine. They had been married sixty-four years. That is a long time in human terms to have been bound by joy as well as by a complex flow or net of many other feelings. Kiss the joy as it flies... Is it even possible? If we find we can, isn't it like kissing our own life away? Or does the kiss of joy as it flies free it to be present and alive in us eternally? 

SNOWFLAKE IN THE SUN 

The acting ways, the behavings, desires, the spoken truth, the memories,

all are but scatterings of maybe    the task of fitting them together,

a hope to make them whole, a me, an identity     occupation of the fool.

The spark in each unknowing isn’t up to me, not mine to know, study, love or abjure,

not even to discover.   The instant it is caught it disappears     leaving    nothing.

A breath     maybe      maybe breath    not meaning    I am     even here.

A snowflake in the sun before it’s possible to count the points is gone.

Once past inspiration’s burst   the certainty    of being        darkness falls

upon the obvious.    The equation is inscribed upon the pad      however

is it dependable     or does the ink dissolve   upon the fragile paper     of the mind?

Christin Lore Weber, 6/11/23