A Poem For Monday

“Monet’s ‘Waterlilies’” by Robert Hayden:

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon

poisons the air like fallout,

I come again to see

the serene great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light

the eye like the eye of faith believes.

The seen, the known

dissolve in iridescence, become

illusive flesh of light

that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.

Here is the aura of that world

each of us has lost.

Here is the shadow of its joy.

(From The Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher  1970 by Robert Hayden. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Painting of waterlilies by Claude Monet, circa 1915, via Wikimedia Commons)