The experience of reading poetry can feel like looking at a piece of art. Some are bursting with energy and myriad ideas - a visual and sensory overload that can even leave you fatigued. And there are those like a Charles Simic poem - sparse and requiring the observer to focus intensely on an idea that is presented masterfully. In his poem The White Room, Simic takes the reader along a journey that ends with these lines:
Gods disguising themselves As black hairpins, a hand-mirror, A comb with a tooth missing? No! That wasn't it. Just things as they are, Unblinking, lying mute In that bright light— And the trees waiting for the night.
The idea of seeing God in everything was something I first heard about as a child. It may have been in response to my question to my mother about why people would worship a rock under a tree and believe that the rock would answer their prayers. The answer as I recall was faith can turn any object into a deity and in that sense its upto us to see God in everything, So I would wonder about things lying around the house that were not of particular value or use to anyone and wonder if the empty can of paint, the old newspapers or the broken plastic bucket could have hidden divinity in them. There was a sense of absurd combined with wonderment in that idea. But as Simic says they were "Just things as they are, Unblinking, lying mute".
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