A Deeper Look

In an earlier Poetry Note titled “Staying Open”, I wrote: “Every day we pass by so much, unobserving.… To see fully what is around us, we need only to slow down. The poet is more than a sensitive feeler of private emotion. The poet is also an observer of the world from which he or she ultimately cannot be separated.

This past week on Facebook, I came across a beautiful example of such a poem. Susan Zimmerman’s captivating “Get Close” is reprinted here with her kind permission.

          Get Close
 
          So close you see something you thought you knew
          as if for the first time, then closer, beyond seeing—
          lost, mystified.
 
          Like the time I photographed
          the grey shadow on the side of a tree, magnifying
          until I realized it was not a shadow but growing moss.
 
          Until I realized the white dots were not dots
          but tiny flowers blooming in the moss,
          until I was so close I disappeared.
 
          In the whole universe there was nothing
          and no one but the tree and me,
          and we were only one thing.

Reprinted also in The Path to Kindness