What you’re looking through, is the act of giving

"I don't get poetry". People often tell me that. Do I get it? No, I don't get all of it either. Entire verses escape me. I may not even get what the poet intended. I am just grateful for a few beautiful lines here and there that speak to me, make me feel less alone in experiencing something. Or breathtaking words that choke me up. Constructions that make me view reality in a way I had not imagined. Images that light me up because I can see them so clearly in my head. A flow that brings quick tears to my eyes and makes me get up and take a walk and come back because I have just been given a vision of such loveliness and I can feel myself expanding to contain it all.

You don't always have to understand. Poetry, or people. There is still a giving. To open up and receive is a choice we make.

That is how I look at it. On the other hand, I could just have a propensity for intoxication, maybe I will grab at any substance, including words? :) :) :) :)

Poem Beginning with a Line by Milosz
Mark Irwin

“The most beautiful bodies are like transparent glass.”
They are bodies of the selfless or of those newly
dead. What appears transparent is really flame
burning so brightly it appears like glass. What
you’re looking through is the act of giving: One
thing in life needed desperately, given to another,
or perhaps life itself. The most beautiful bodies
are not transparent, but sometimes the color
of lead, like the elephant whom a child with some
peanuts lifts by the trunk in his hand in the swirling
dust, so that it appears he has lifted a monument
or a city with all its pain. The bodies that seem
transparent are made of an ice so pure it appears
to be glass sweating, where you, desiring another,
glimpse your own face that weighs nothing and is burning.