Beauty & Time Poem by Michael Maxwell Steer

The parade of beauty never ends.
Nature in harmony is often cruel,
but even what it gnarls it lends
a countoured logic, one whose jeweled

asymmetry creates a form
no human mind can equal save
in dream, when all our waking norms
are overwhelmed by tidal waves

of cosmic energy, and sounds
and shapes and thoughts appear pell mell,
whose residue, like amber found
on shorelines, we by craft distil

into communicable feelings.
Nature's riddle's resolution
comes at last with sense revealing
love the force of evolution.


By chance today, when sore in soul,
I wandered from my normal tracks
and now, beside this stream made whole,
I celebrate my journey back.

The simple beings that I see,
the birds, the trees, the fish, the stream,
each fill their place; but what of me
who must discover what I seem?

Being still - I know what when
in motion I deny, my being's
oneness with the source that men
intent on gain go past unseeing.

It is our insecurities
that blind us to the ways of stillness.
Heedless of one whose cure it is
to change and heal this kind of illness

we cling to man-made forms, afraid
lest we should lose what most we hate:
when all the time in nature's trade
the thundering storm is what creates

the perfect contour, and the sublime
look which outlives human scale
and stands a testament to time
as human wishes fail.

Thus reconnected once again
to the archetype of ‘life
outlasting life' I find the strength
to reengage in daily strife.


18/09/2008