Mark Scrivener Poetry Blog No 84 Seeing

SEEING

This is a poem about our inner experience of vision. I am not suggesting it as an alternative to the scientific and medical explanation of the physical mechanism of human sight: light entering the eye, image falling on the retina etc. However, it is known that we see not just with the eye but actually with our consciousness- The visual cortex is the largest system in the human brain and is responsible for processing the visual image. It lies at the rear of the brain (highlighted in the image), above the cerebellum. Wikipedia.

After all, in some sense, we experience vision as sharing reality with what is out there beyond our own physical body. So this poem is about vision with awareness and imagination as a sharing in the being of the world.

photo Mark Scrivener 

 

SEEING

Seeing is a touching.

To look towards blue, to glance

with eyes' intelligence

along a sun-etched cloud

is to fly

where light birds wander,

freed upon unbounded sky.

Vision is a travelling. To gaze

towards growing dusk, roving

to the rim of sight,

where earth shape meets sky space,

is to glide

across the curved earth-face,

journeying with the fall of darkness.

Perception is connection. To see our star,

reddened and descending

behind the silhouettes of trees

that shiver with the day's last breeze,

is to ride

a fragment of the spiral of all time,

companioned by this wandering world;

is to see

Earth following its sun

through illimitable

regions of reality.