Paul R. Davis - Three Poems

The Milky Way Poem

(After viewing a nine gigapixel image)

 

You can’t hold it in just one hand,

it is ordinary in the universe,

 

It is everything we know,

it is everything we do not know,

 

special to its inhabitants.

What makes it so?

 

It is all things to all people,

it is nothing in the awesomeness of time.

 

Some call its nine gigapixel image

a muddy creek, some will call it false god.

 

A single flower is more worthy of devotion,

and God must surely know.

 

A cup, a bow, tree of forever growing branches,

sanctuary and nursery:

 

how must we think, worship,

contemplate?  Let us eat from the same plate.

 

In its bulge, in its spiral arms,

in its dust is our history and future,

 

but we fight and consume,

love and die,

 

and try to hold in futility,

crave and grasp

 

while this vast companion of our sleeping

is too real, too sentient

 

and again, it is we,

it is us.

 

The secret of this galaxy is its art.

Let no one know.

 

Oceanic

 

Giant squid in the depths

Of the calm Pacific,

How does your last breath

In the sunlit darkness feel?

I can only imagine how jealous

You might be of my successes,

Of my historical youth,

Of my bicycling on a summer evening.

But I return to you, slowly sinking

To the ocean floor

To be divine in the stomach

Of another living creature.

I, too, consider myself divine,

But I eat mindlessly

And sleep some nights without

That wandering thought

That is a soundtrack to days

Where space between the trees

Holds my mind like an empty

Hand.  

 

 

Tu Vates Eris

 

(With the poem, “Ver erat”, Rimbaud
took the first prize for Latin composition
in verse. The story said he finished in
an hour and he did not consult his

Gradus ad parnassium.)

 

You are born naked

beneath the cordial blessings of lifting hands.

Unseen, silent, white in blueness,

the shabby ground swells its pregnant belly,

shakes the thundering word -

learn!

You must grip the scattered sounds

and give them - no - build them

a house to inhabit,

with the milk of your eyes and hands of thought.

When the seasons have brought you

to equilibrium, to a graciousness of contentment,

then you will know they will not be lost,

and you will be clothed.

 

 

 

Paul R. Davis does not hold an MFA, and believes in a simple poetic philosophy:  the joy of expression, the necessity of communication.  His poems are imagistic, philosophical, lyrical, and take you somewhere you may have never been.