Two Words

If anyone else reading this blog would like to put down a few words-on hands or anything else- it would be a pleasure to hear from you.

Celeste writes:

I once wrote a poem consisting of only two words: Hands birdsHands is an image. Birds is an image. Between them, a long wordless flight. Each reverberates in the stillness. The reverberations intermingle. In the centre one begins to pick up the interacting waves of sound and picture. The winged limb at rest and at full stretch. Agility, grace, efficiency, versatility, the power of the small: man's hand; birds. How one may hold another hand in one's own, like a bird, warm soft and perishable, it is held in trust. How one may hold a bird in one's hand, and feel the tender beating savage presence; through all the tenderness one feels as well the predatory claw, the blast off flight, the endurance, the skill.

One could muse forever on hand and bird, how they are similar and different. How they participate in the being of earth, both creatures of a feathered god with a thousand arms.

How hard it is to say anything about the poem without as it were putting handcuffs on the hands and tethers on the birds. If however one utters the word "hands" and then moves in its wake through the stirring stillness to "birds", and the two notes then work their magic simultaneously, the poem begins to live, and to do its work in the listening ear. There is really nothing to say, there is a mood in which quiet meditation seems most full of meaning. Hands birdsOut of such a mood of speechlesness the poem was formed .In the crisis to which life compels us, we search for the form by that which we may best join the world. As we come into touch with other beings, we discover ourselves. This is precise. As I experience the presence of a tree or a field or a stream or another person or a tremor that runs through me with a force of its own, I know myself through that experience. If I turn my glance always inward, I will look into the dark. The dark is real and rich, and it is surely there. But I will know nothing about it by looking into it, for I will see nothing. I will see into the dark only if I look at you. Then the dark will stir, will be stirred by our friction; a light will float like a feather in that dark and my whole being will shake with the creation that then happens.

I think Muhammad Ali once came up with the world's shortest poem. It went something like this (if I remember correctly):

Me. Us.