Does My Sparkle Amuse You?

If you were a boat, the following could be said: When the waves are tossing you about and the turbulence is more than you can bear you return to port. Returning to the safety of the harbor where you find refuge and safety among others of your kind.

Life isn’t entirely different than sailing. When a woman feels as if her very being is shattering – during childbirth – she calls out for her mother. Our natural instinct is to return home. Sometimes home is a town, a building, the loving arms of friends and family, and sometimes it is merely a smell or a memory. I place we long to be but can never find in the physical sense.

I feel that way myself from time to time. I seek the camaraderie of a particular melody or the words of a poem. Today it was the lovely words written nearly one hundred years ago by poet Amy Lowell. I have a delightful text book from 1923 that describes Amy in the following way:

No one has fought, in theory and in practice, the battles for the experimental artist, for a sider aesthetic appreciation with more determination than Amy Lowell. And no one has shown such ability to learn from her own experiments.

Maybe I feel kindred to her. Maybe I dream about being described that way in the future. Maybe I just find her words deliciously feminine yet admirably strong. Today she drew me in with a lovely poem titled: A Lady

A LADY

You are beautiful and faded

Like an old opera tune

Played upon a harpsichord;

Or like the sun-flooded silks

Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.

In your eyes

Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived

minutes,

And the perfume of your soul

Is vague and suffusing,

With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.

Your half-tones delight me,

And I grow mad with gazing

At your blent colours.

My vigour is a new-minted penny,

Which I cast at your feet.

Gather it up from the dust,

That its sparkle may amuse you.

In closing – I hope that I sparkle a bit, even though I am faded…and I hope that my sparkle may amuse you.

May your paths be abundantly filled with lemons, sugar, sunshine, and amusing sparkle!

~Crystal

Photo courtesy of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Lowell