Digging for Divinity

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

Flowers are seen through a crack

In the garden gate.

~ Buson [Englished by Phillip Whidden]

In Wallingford we passed a house and fence

And got a peak through fissures in the gate.

The beauty in those slivers, though, was dense

With meaning, more than meaning.  There was freight

Of human work and human art.  Beyond

The slits a woman saw us.  She approached

And asked us in.  Generosity dawned

Across our grateful hearts.  The flowers broached

The empire of the gorgeous and of course

Her magnanimity was part of all

That glory.  She had made the lovely force

Through work and love — and made a space to thrall.

  Enthralled we were by years of love with mind

    And hands.  Her jewel-like blossoms had been mined.