Delight in each prolific rendering of beauty,
as if the earth a brew of tea
and beauty its steaming wisps.
This an inalienable wonder
proved in either dirt or star
or any blend between.
Repel to deny to learn too little so often
as is each short infinity through beauty!

Beauty they say caresses the tender, arouses the dormant,
excites the innocent, tempers the strong, guides the wise, binds
the wicked, comforts the good, so why then do we so often ignore
and abuse beauty?

If I walk slowly on soft earth amidst a native meadow,
tongued by light, by wisps of breeze,
touched across my chest and shoulder,
back and thigh with warming sun,
drawn by the incessant celebration of young twists of leafed branch,
spiked grasses and the willing exposition of the flowers,
will I not know of beauty and therefore
be caressed, aroused, excited, tempered, guided, bound and comforted?

May I not then add this taste of beauty to myself
or will I remove myself from experience,
another new reminder that such is not nor ever will be me;
that human is apart? To see and then be blind,
to touch and then be empty,
to join and then be cast apart
is to find and then to lose
the precious human birthright.
For we are smothered in the revelation of beauty,
as awakening to each day within these stars must surely be.

If we must, we are charged to take our birthright privately
rather than be pelted with the dusts of contempt,
of incoherent denial, of jealous resentment,
of the darker splendored substitutions
fashioned from culture and politic, and war.

We are to strive in the breadths of our human mind to know the
even more intolerable and secret splendors of beauty.

If we rise each day
and in our civilian duty declare
no other purpose than the exploration of beauty,
would we then find the beauty in the purpose of ourselves?

1983 Brian Hayes