A Beauty Rare and Commonplace

Polio at age thirteen
had closed the shutters on her teenage world:
on dancing, high heels, sport and boys --
the latter through her mum's great fear:
impossible to run away.
(One leg a lowly fraction of its former self:
two babies would reduce it further later on.)

Concluded too, her great desire to nurse. And then
the local schools would not accept her.
(Too dangerous, negotiating stairs!) And yet
I've never heard complaint, not once,
of how life spins its roulette wheel.
(I doubt that such a thing as randomness exists,
not absolutely. Random numbers are
a fiction. Random chance? No chance at all!
)
I'm looking at her now;
she in the garden, me upstairs,
she on her kneeler on the lawn,
around her spread her plants and pots,
her compost and her tools.
There's beauty both in her and how she works;
does what she does the way she can,
shows not a sign of all her struggling.
Makes light of all that's burdensome for her.

Sound of a stick upon the floor, a sound
from somebody that toils from chair to chair
wrote Yeats. He might have written it of her,
the words a perfect fit. It's commonplace.
It is. She makes it so, and makes it so
afresh from day to day. And yet
there's nothing stirs my heart as much --
nor ever will.


Simply to avoid misunderstandings: Reader, I married her.

Hobgoblin at dVerse ~ Poets Pub suggested that we wrote about beauty in the everyday.