National Poetry Writing Month

It's NaPoWriMo.!  I'm taking it as Poetry Appreciation month as well, and have posted poems I like on facebook over the last three days.  I'm also writing poems.  The aim is for one a day, which I've done  - all two days of the month so far.  These poems are too shy to show their faces to the light of day yet, so instead, I'll post another of my favourite poems, one that I also posted on facebook today.  People who have signed up to follow this blog might be surprised at the sudden appearance of a few (perhaps many) posts this month, in contrast to how often I usually post, while those who are fb friends might feel that they've seen the poem somewhere before.     I learnt it walking to work and back, years ago, and revised it on a road trip round Western Australia with a dear friend.   Thanks to Australian poet John Allison for this treasure:

Towards the Horizon

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon.
(Emerson)

In Swedish it is synkrets—
sight-circle. And the evidence of eyes
is that space is curved
and that the membrane of the sky
arches over us
and arcs around the blue silence
at the edge
of vision.
There we find some sense of equilibrium,
poised between the lyric
lift and epic weight
of our existence and the world’s.
Birds migrating in their lines and skeins
find it perfectly.
The line of equality and that of the horizon
are the same, said Leonardo
marking out the shape of it on paper.

We talk like this, turning
every thought into the filaments
which thread the space between our words
until that silence
fills the lattice-work of light,
until that blue of distance comes up close
and pours itself into
the apertures that suddenly appear,
these openings from the world into a world
awakening—
your eyes are the horizon
and this side of them
nothing ever will be quite the same again.