"Equanimity" by Les Murray:
we are looking into the light–
it makes some smile, some grimace.
more natural to look at the birds about the street, their life
that is greedy, pinched, courageous and prudential
as any on these bricked tree-mingled miles of settlement,
to watch the unceasing on-off
grace that attends their nearly every movement,
the same grace moveless in the shapes of trees
and complex in our selves and fellow walkers: we see it’s indivisible
and scarcely willed. That it lights us from the incommensurable
we sometimes glimpse, from being trapped in the point
(bird minds and ours are so pointedly visual):
a field all foreground, and equally all background,
like a painting of equality. Of infinite detailed extent
like God’s attention. Where nothing is diminished by perspective.
The full poem can be found here. J. M. Coetzee breaks it down:
We should not be dismayed, suggests Murray, by the elusive, flickering, on-off quality of our contact with the numinous. Rather, we should learn to wait with equanimity—as poet or as believer—for the next flash of grace.
(Photo: A Dalmatian pelican nestles its head in its feathers as falling rain leaves water droplets on its feathers at the Berlin Zoo on September 9, 2011 in Berlin, Germany. By Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
The Dish 