L.R. Harvey Poetry

Sunset Poetry “Poets maintain meter while at the same time modulating it, so that, even as it preserves its under-lying regularity, it accommodates a limitless wealth of grammatical structures and sentence forms.” – Timothy Steele I like to think that nature mimics formal Verse in her sunsets: sun, horizon, and sky, Like meter, rhyme, and stanza, a set of normal Conditions that one should rightly expect to find When reading verse or watching a setting sun - A certain sort of structure, giving form And shape to art (the one of words and the one Of light.) And yet within this patterned norm Exist unlimited content variations: In verse, innumerable arrangements of sounds That work with form, like structured combinations - In sunsets, a color palette that knows no bounds.

Words “The tongue has the power of life and death.” – Proverbs 18:31 If broken rock shows water’s strength, And end of life, the second’s length - If termite’s bite’s the house’s rue, And sickly cell’s the cancer’s cue - If a single stroke can fault the art, Then simplest words can heal a heart.

An Artist’s World “God is eccentric; He has loves, not reasons.” – Robert Farrar Capon The prickly prongs of needled pine, The loving shape of the redbud’s heart, The dogwood’s rivulet design, The thorny shape of holly’s spines – Observing these I often start To wonder at the art. If photosynthesis transpires In pine and beech and holly leaves, This leaves the thinker to inquire The purpose of the spheres and spires That ornament the various trees And blow upon the breeze. Perhaps there’s more to art than use, And since the Maker called it “good” And loves the shapes of oak and spruce And made a world where he could loose An artist’s creative touch and could Create what He saw good, If He decides He likes the pine Because He shaped its needled leaf, Or lily’s paralleling lines Because the lily’s His design, Than that itself’s enough for me To love the e...