Ron Price
10-05-2005, 06:02 AM
CHUNKY BREASTS
Words tell me where I am.
-D. J. Enright in The Lyre and the Pawnshop: Essays on Literature and Survival: 1974-1984, UWA, 1986, p.196.
I have just got my twenty books from two libraries
and put them on my shelf where I can see them
at a glance. I pick one, somewhat at random,
to read in my chair looking out over my garden.
Such enchanting trees and shrubs,
they blow a million leaves
with a thousand shapes
through my eyes and the blue sky beckons,
always high, lifting me up
but only in my heart.
The dog barks his familiar strain
and the doves walk across the grass
looking, as I look, for the food of life
to keep their chunky breasts chunky
and their children fed.
I begin reading
as I have now for thirty-three years
in massive quantities, hoping that here,
between the covers, I will find
some food for my paper-thin breast
and my dry branches and trees
will turn fresh and green again
and become arrayed with
new blossoms and fruits....
For here, I know, is some
dynamic power for the arteries of life;
here is the very soul of the world.
Here is a boundless sea, its limits,
its forms and it has been boiling
all these decades scattering
pearls of knowledge
on the shore of life.*
Ron Price
17 December 1995
‘Abdu’l-Baha, Secret of Divine Civilization, (US, 1975), pp.108-110.
Words tell me where I am.
-D. J. Enright in The Lyre and the Pawnshop: Essays on Literature and Survival: 1974-1984, UWA, 1986, p.196.
I have just got my twenty books from two libraries
and put them on my shelf where I can see them
at a glance. I pick one, somewhat at random,
to read in my chair looking out over my garden.
Such enchanting trees and shrubs,
they blow a million leaves
with a thousand shapes
through my eyes and the blue sky beckons,
always high, lifting me up
but only in my heart.
The dog barks his familiar strain
and the doves walk across the grass
looking, as I look, for the food of life
to keep their chunky breasts chunky
and their children fed.
I begin reading
as I have now for thirty-three years
in massive quantities, hoping that here,
between the covers, I will find
some food for my paper-thin breast
and my dry branches and trees
will turn fresh and green again
and become arrayed with
new blossoms and fruits....
For here, I know, is some
dynamic power for the arteries of life;
here is the very soul of the world.
Here is a boundless sea, its limits,
its forms and it has been boiling
all these decades scattering
pearls of knowledge
on the shore of life.*
Ron Price
17 December 1995
‘Abdu’l-Baha, Secret of Divine Civilization, (US, 1975), pp.108-110.