About the Column:

Poems of Our Climate is a weekly poetry column run by Oliver Egger ’23. Oliver Egger also runs the literary magazine group Route 9 whose literary magazine The Lavender was released last month! READ IT ONLINE AT ROUTE9.ORG. This second issue is metamorphosis themed and is looking for poetry, prose, and art connected to moments of change. Submit your poetry at tinyurl.com/wespoetry. If you are interested in having your poem featured in this column, Poems of Our Climate, please email your work directly to oegger@wesleyan.edu. 

To Capture

By Lila Blaustein ’23

 

I walk the forest floor with two feet.

Two eyes holding one image

a sight of trees and green

the weaving of innumerable 

branches,   beauty

a word which floats up

which my mind hands forward

 

But the silence of beauty

the momentary sound of its acknowledgement

ringing in its empty well

in weakness, in the commotion that raised me

 

I reach for more.

 

Although I attach to it in small ways, 

to the leaves like flicks of color,

the clarity of the air 

and light catching 

on the golden line of a spider web, 

I bump against the place that desires 

no language, desires nothing, 

and still,

 

I reach to grab.

 

Because it is not enough to feel the way I feel

I must take

things outside, bring them

into my fabric of blood 

and passageways, make them alone

mine, alone

and therefore exalted

 

And in love, too.

all things precious and felt

just mine be mine only mine

I hold my love’s face in my hands

feel fingers on her neck and cheek

 

Feeling something so large it controls me

feeling it must be

the largest

 

I reach to capture.

 

And to own.

Assured because all love’s, 

weaker than mine,

cannot subtract from what 

I have here, a perfect face 

that breathes.

I press a circle on a screen,

I take a picture of the trees.

 

I claw with futile hands

to collect things 

that will outlive me.

 

About the Poet: 

Lila Blaustein is a junior at Wesleyan from Needham, Massachusetts.

Lila Blaustein can be reached at lblaustein@wesleyan.edu