A Poem That Defines the Word "Elegant"
As I was consuming my daily intake of good poetry, I came across a winner of the Foyle Young poets competition, whose piece did not fail to impress. Each and every word calms your being, and I figured I would share with you.
“For”, by Idris Scrase:
I notice you in the light
distilling on the dawn’s eyelid
I notice you in the handwriting of dew
budding bright the lacework of spiders
holding the sun’s atom
and your laughter in this palmful of minnows
splintering waterlight under a window of reeds
I know a room. I know the way a piano stands like a horse
grinning in shadow. I notice our mouths unfurl
like two nightflowers, folding in reverse. I notice our flesh
grows inward to the same point. Like a pendulum
of blue wisteria, lit and loosening
down a slanted weathervane.
I notice your absence crowds me
like crows festering
these bald branches.
I hear the lilt of your breath
like a moth lifting a wing, a petal
of frost deep under my ribs’ cattlegrid.
I notice it is midnight in Trondheim. The snow laid out like a carcass of pearls
and the gooseberries jewelling it. I notice a colour, pressing there in the silence
between stars, like ripeness under the lid of a greengage. Somebody
lifting the sky’s mute curtain
to let the light in.
Love opened
like that promise in space.
flickering, incremental
then all, a lungful of seaglass
the horizons petalled in emerald
and Heaven’s canvas burning.
Dusk now and the quiet sun dips its wounds against the leaves
which flicker lucent. Astonished, their skin a tapestry of stained glass
letting each drop of twilight slip tender through the clear flesh
(soft as a word your lips loosen to the dark)
and then it’s gone.


This is so exquisitely beautiful!