"Human Beauty" by Albert Goldbarth

I was perusing poetryfoundation.org
and came across this poem. I love the beautiful way in which the author explores our attempts, with language and symbol, to capture and name beauty. The narrative ending in particular is lovely and thought-provoking.

----------

If you write a poem about love ...
the love is a bird,

the poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death ...

the death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames

you feed to the fire.
We can see, in these, the space between

our gestures and the power they address
—an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,

a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night

in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props: a box

of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped
and broken open, and that flash of white

confetti was lost
inside what it was a praise of.