Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TO HELEN KELLER, by JOHN VARNEY


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TO HELEN KELLER, by                    
First Line: Her eyes, miniature mirrors
Last Line: Her hands touch hands!
Subject(s): Eyes; Flowers; Keller, Helen (1880-1968); Love


Her eyes, miniature mirrors,
Distort what they face;
Shelled with iris folds
Ribboning reality, they
Color formlessly what they confront.
They smell the flowers they finger
And add the flowers' imagery;
Finger down to roots they cannot see,
But feel the flowers' food.
Like a groping sleeper in the night
They pass things doubly:
The sleeper dreams resisting objects
To be opening gates;
This poet shadows a word
To build a Babel with, or
An air-fleet's sky-harbor steel-ballasted.
Well is she blind
And to her blurred shapes vagaries:
For she studies one primordial pattern,
The waves that crested at love's inception
And the birth of light;
These waves break upon her eyeballs as
Her hands touch hands!





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