A Poem: Enough

I wish I could tell you the world is enough.
Her mountains and rivers,
her blankets of forest.

Her sun,
tinting the snow pink,
catching the tips of pines at sunset,

rippling the sea with crystal light,
turning the new leaves of spring
transparent.

I wish I could tell you
it’s all we need,

this world
with its heights and vistas,
its soaring peaks, its river valleys.

Its seasons—
snowmelt, blossom burst,
summer foliage
and autumn radiance.

I wish I could tell you it were enough
to perceive, or to touch.

But the world in her expanse
has a wild detachment,
too beautiful to be true, almost—
evading possession.

And our soul
is like someone swimming,
diving into water, taking a deep breath,
drawing air.

Unless the imprint of the world
is left upon us,
we remain bereft.

So, I say, the world, impermanent,
is not enough.

We need to see the reels
behind our eyelids.
We need to marry beauty
that her seeds take root, to flourish,

that the world grows on the inside,
as real within
as through our eyes,

at our fingertips.

Ana Lisa de Jong
Living Tree Poetry
January 2023

`Convolvulus,’ said my mother.
Pale shell-pink, a chalice
no wider across than a silver sixpence.
It looked at me, I looked
back, delight
filled me as if
I, not the flower,
were a flower and were brimful of rain.
And there was endlesness.
Perhaps through a lifetime what I’ve desired
has always been to return
to that endless giving and receiving, the wholeness
of that attention,
that once-in-a-lifetime
secret communion.

– Denise Levertov, from First Love
in This Great Unknowing, Last Poems