Beauty Abrades the Harshness

If there is an antidote

to the harshness

that wells up

in the corners of the

unexamined life,

it is beauty.

The slanting,

early morning,

cool rays of the sun

expose an inquisitiveness

that somehow turns

to awe as I watch it dig

and claw its way to earth,

through the deep, dense vapor

of the morning cloud that sits

here on this mountain.

If not for this ten

small minutes in the

pool of early morning

stillness, I would have missed

a lifetime of beauty

reaching out for the tender and

ominous soil upon which

we all take our place.

What could my day have

become had not this

ravishing and glorious

beauty of an early morning

stellar drama taken away the

potential raspy harshness

that lies just below

the surface of our social and

political ways.  For in them

we fight as if we were

left alone with only the

resources we have built

with feeble and myopic hands

and discontent.  And yet,

an eye leaning into the

morning’s light; an ear

leaning into the cicada’s trill

forces away from us –

even for a breath

of an infinitesimal

instant of time –

the horrid dependency

on our own singular and

vacuous aloneness.

For an instant –

that instant –

beauty abrades the harshness

and a stillness enters

that saves us from our own

undoing and shame.