On Beauty


I wanted to write something beautiful,
So I looked around

And tried to capture the splendor
Of the sun, the essence of a spring blossom,

The cadence of a robin,
The nature of a cloud–

But perhaps beauty cannot be caught,
Or perhaps I don’t have the skill.

Perhaps beauty lies only in the brevity
And untameable wildness of a moment

When your soul gets tangled up
With the elemental and mysterious

And it is you–your breath–
That gets caught instead.