A Poem: For Beauty

I think beauty has become the new bread.
There was a day we scanned our emails
for bills, for discount sales, for those things
we’d forgotten we had meant to do. And now:

Now we check each platform we belong
for snippets enough to feed on.
To gather together to make a meal to sate
the gnawing of our stomachs, our hungry mouths.

And beauty has become a need,
like water, or shelter.
The beauty of friendship, of connection
in a world a little fractured, frayed at the edge,

that beauty becomes like thread for
mending tears,
or a doctor’s ministrations
to set our broken bones,
to give us faith in healing.

Now beauty is as much a comfort
as a hope.
A hope of something exceedingly better,
or even just the ordinary becoming
commonplace again.

For who would use their time on beauty
unless there were a chance
for our continuing.
Who would waste good bread
to serve beauty on a platter as sweet cake.

Ana Lisa de Jong
Living Tree Poetry
December 2020