It's as if the world is trying,
cloud by cloud,
to create the fairest fantasies:
A cloud-bank seen in morning adds
an unseen mountain range,
and shadows played on fluffy depths
silhouette a half-imagined grove.
If I seize these dreams and let my heart fly
into these impossible what-ifs,
it seems to me the world's
a far more magical place.
The earth is full of possibles,
I see them all around:
Misty heights appearing
with the coming of a cloud;
in the dancing fire,
there's a world of half-seen dreams,
glowing canyons heated
high and uncontained;
damp sand, dripped, like wax
will build a fairy castle
for the froggies and the flies;
in the wrinked mess of twining roots,
the hollows and the leaves,
a hundred tiny hovels - undiscovered -
with a beauty all their own;
frozen mud, crystal-crusted,
palaces of earth and ice
stretched by nature's freezing *****...
they lay bare beneath our feet if we will
stoop to look so low;
and frosting on the windowpanes,
growing like a portrait of a luscious
2-D land.
They are tiny pocket worlds, all of them,
universe unshared
yet no less fair for the eyes
that do not see.
Beauty unseen is beauty nonetheless.
But how much happier the man who
looks about him for the whisper,
for the quiet, crystal piercing of the light
that shines just barely on the other side
of all that can be seen.
Tiny pocket worlds all, and completely
unexplored.
But you and I can walk there,
if we tend the fairy dream.