Today's poem is by Campbell McGrath

La Corrèze
       

There are poems hiding everywhere—tiny snails beneath lily pads, roses so burdened by blossoms they must lie down upon the grass to rest.
Green irises swell the waterway by the ancient village laundry, stone pools descending through dog's head spigots
until the stream spills back into its flower-choked channel, cascading into a small whirlpool of star-clustered algae.
The neighboring farm is run by three generations of women, none of whom have traveled farther than Limoges, or possibly Toulouse.

To escape not from time but time's intermediaries—tyrannical clocks, names on maps, calendar grids like battalions of tin soldiers.

The enormous canvas of the circus tent, the cinematic vista of lives moving forward and back across decades,
history like a clown car, fate like a net spread below high wire artists—these are not the jurisdiction of poetry,
which approves the dragonfly's Dionysian minutiae, and knows that every snail shell encompasses a destiny,
and what it means, as the trapeze swings from darkness into the spotlight's glare, to reach for the grasping hand.

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Copyright © 2023 Campbell McGrath All rights reserved
from Copper Nickel
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission