Blink
by Morton Marcus
You’ve got to love life so much that you don’t want to
miss a moment of it, and pay such close attention to
whatever you’re doing that each time you blink you can
hear your eyelashes applauding what you’ve just seen.
In each eye there are more than 80 eyelashes, forty
above and forty below, like forty pairs of arms working,
80 pairs in both eyes, a whole audience clapping so loud
you can hardly bear to listen.
160 hands batter each other every time you blink.
“Bravo!” they call. “Encore! Encore!”
Paralyzed in a hospital bed, or watching the cold rain
from under a bridge—remember this.
I extend thanks to a couple of photoblogger friends for passing this poem along to me. As I explore a new city, and my senses are on high alert - especially my sense of sight - this piece keeps popping into my head.
2 comments:
Thank you for this!
My students' homework for this weekend: Pay Attention. Notice. Even the small things of life. Notice them.
I used the examples of someone who paints pictures or a photographer to illustrate my point that I want them to start seeing things the way a writer sees them...to choose words for them the way a painter chooses colors for a painting, the way a photographer ponders the way a subject is cast in a certain quality of light.
And so this weekend, I have been paying more attention, too, and oh what a world of gorgeous detail it is!!!!
--KB
I sent this to MA in her time of darkness. Thanks my fiend.
SM
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