If beauty speaks,
It speaks, and then it dies.
Beauty perishes.
What beauty can my poetry save?
It is vanity that my poetry tries?
Is beauty most serene when brave?
Does the cypress apologize to the lake,
Its reflection repetitive and still?
What beauty can I possibly make?
What beauty can my poem fill
With beauty, and which beauty will this forsake?
Is beauty mine, by no accident? By my own will?
For I have seen beauty casually in a handful of leaves
Be so beautiful, beauty itself almost grieves
That beauty is a ghost, which no one believes.
Everything you say
Can be disputed.
So every poem must die—
Unless it makes you laugh—
Or if it makes you cry.
