Darius Stewart
The Terribly Beautiful
To say this is the story of our lives.
Who is to say there is a story at all?
To be enchanted by a tune—
“Clair de Lune” from Suite Bergamasque—
when we complain moonlight pales
finer features of the disrobed body:
your sinewy muscles, my clumsy limbs.
To endure amaryllis blossoms season after season,
but the fly’s life will last no longer
than the passing of one hour to the next.
To be the river that empties into the gulf,
& the gulf that destroys land
on which our houses are built.
To misunderstand the world we grieve.
To understand the grief.
Darius Stewart is the author of three chapbooks: The Terribly Beautiful (2006), Sotto Voce (2008), each of which was an Editor’s Choice Selection in the Main Street Rag Poetry Chapbook Series, and The Ghost the Night Becomes (2014), winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Prize. He earned an M.F.A. from the Michener Center for Writers, where he was a James A. Michener Fellow in poetry, and lives in Knoxville, TN with his dog Philip J. “Fry.”
This poem appeared in The Terribly Beautiful.