Friday 15 November 2013

The Meaning of Existence

Who could resist a poem with that title? Not me, for sure - especially as it's so pleasingly compact. Indeed it's from a 2002 collection called Poems the Size of Photographs, by Australia's GLP (greatest living poet) Les Murray, who normally tends more towards poems very much larger, denser, more highly coloured and freely worked.
Here is his lucid miniature, which surely speaks for itself:

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would
have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.

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