Meditation on Beauty
By Izak R. Crafford

 

For: Marinus Mohr, Luka Jansen van Vuuren and Brandon Miller who, each in his own way, inspired this contemplation.

 

Tame little sonatas,

irreproachably elegant in their motion:

perfect specimens of subjugated beauty,

frivolous in their brash dismissal of the truth

which fills the scent of stream-bed mud

and the rippling violence deep in the hunter’s hand

which can bring death or withhold it

and tenderly stroke and summon forth gushing love and awe,

though the love of something so primal couldn’t be explained,

painted over by contrived feelings and civility.

 

Rarely glimpsed in perfect flower gardens

and in faces subjugated to convention,

yet flowing in the possession of the handshake

and the fierce embrace born of the fear of losing you,

lies that beauty so vast and terrifying

that it’s been exiled to savagery and darkness.

 

Tame little sonatas,

entirely safe;

the terror of the hunter’s visage and the vastness of the universe and of love,

too much to seek to grasp thus banished,

confined to existentialist meditations –

dismissed out of hand, for all beauty is sad

And sadness must be painted over.