Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Blink

Poet and painter Kirsten Rian has a wonderful practice of emailing a poem to her friends every Monday. This is one she recently sent me - it took my breath away.



Blink

by Morton Marcus


You’ve got to love life so much that you don’t want to
miss a moment of it, and pay such close attention to
whatever you’re doing that each time you blink you can
hear your eyelashes applauding what you’ve just seen.

In each eye there are more than 80 eyelashes, forty
above and forty below, like forty pairs of arms working,
80 pairs in both eyes, a whole audience clapping so loud
you can hardly bear to listen.

160 hands batter each other every time you blink.
“Bravo!” they call. “Encore! Encore!”

Paralyzed in a hospital bed, or watching the cold rain
from under a bridge—remember this.

(Image: Vision II, ©1999 from the series Mapping the Body)

2 comments:

Kesha Bruce said...

Lovely image and poem....and a great idea.

Hope you're off somewhere enjoying your summer. Making new work perhaps?

Photographing Children said...

This is a gorgeous poem, Danny. I have forwarded this on to friends and printed it out for myself. The image you posted is à propos. Sending love. Ginny