Saturday 16 July 2011

A Morning on Our Earth by Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke

for Michelle Mrozkowski

“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”
-- Frederic Chopin

Carefully, morning unfolds itself; filled with small,
trackless serendipities grounded in light. An Emperor
Butterfly blesses a lagoon—a still cool breeze accepts
its royal blue.
We are eighty years beyond, the speak-
easy is now filled with many garish, fleshly butterflies,
some barely legal; we are sixty-six years beyond, Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, once laid bare, now contend with fallout
of mornings fallen:

into the west their wabi-sabi

has wandered; and all the lagoons, all the butterflies
it has passed are soft calls in this hard, digital age,
governed by men intoxicated by anything but the sensum
of feeling. Such is the cliché. I see

*

their private regrets, they are a thing of beauty to our
quiescent Earth. The wars; of ideology; of flesh;
are different intimations of the same breeze—so
futile to try to bundle its usefulness into anything
harmful: its power is the timelessness of time, the
forgotten purity of movement centuries gone, now, to
come. Butterflies do not die from cancer. Humankind
juggles its death, but somehow the skittles do not fall.
Let us return. Morning calls. And as today becomes
extinct, let us not be ashamed: a crimson past

affects us now, and the slices of hope, still fragile,
still carefully unfolding, have at their edges nothing
if not the defining darkness we are leaving, for
our hearts’ language now lives in the breeze.


Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke, Queensland, Australia

5 comments:

Crafty Green Poet said...

Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke has had four collections of poetry published: S-h-h-hidelplonk (2002); Deep Wings (2004); Three Hundred and Sixty-four Paper Boats (2007); and Ultramundane Shadows (2008). The latter is an e-book, and can be read for free on-line. Deep Wings likewise is now available on-line. Michael resides in Townsville, Queensland, Australia. His blog is at: http://michaelfitzgerald-clarke.blogspot.com/.

Ashley Burns said...

Enjoyed this :)

Tim Dorsey said...

gentle morning reduces yesterday's catastrophe to thoughfulness? i used to live in a room full of butterflies. would breed them everywhere . . . then came the caterpillars and things got weird, lemme tell you.

wedding photography Melbourne said...

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Gisele said...

A gentle read, for I like my mornings soft and slow especially when the words slide over the ugly flows mankind has created. Lovely.