What I Have Seen (A Poem)

"What I Have Seen"

by Virginia Knowles

I have seen the fog floating low

Over young orange trees

In a grove once killed

By a hard freeze.

I had thought all of it was gone

I had not freshly noticed

The grove or its new growth

Until I saw the fog.

I woke on Friday morning at 7 AM, after the 6:30 alarm did not go off. But the second alarm did: "Spinal injection 8 AM." Just enough time to put on some clothes and brave the traffic for 38 minutes in hopes that this shot (unlike the last) would abate the pain. I tucked a protein bar in my purse for breakfast.

It was in the stop and go traffic on Maitland Boulevard that I glanced to the right, where groves once dominated, now taken over mostly by new development. Then I saw the fog. And the trees. And I thought right away of things that I do not always notice coming back to life, or to my life, in the midst of all of the other new things.

I think metaphorically. All the time. I am a philosopher at heart. And since I am also a poet, the lines came. I had thought of another line: "It is in the mist and the mystery / That I pause and ponder / What I have seen." But that seemed too moralistic, to obvious, to put in the poem. Yet it is true, so here we are in my end notes.

I borrowed the title of this poem, sort of, from "What I Have Found" by John Leax. I read it in his book Grace Is Where I Live a long while back and put it in my blog a few years ago, and linked it on Facebook even later. Facebook brought it up again Friday in its memories feature, so I had just read it that morning before I drove to my appointment. It still speaks to me in my own midlife, which is at times a place of trial and heartache and pain. Here it is for you.

"What I Have Found"

by John Leax

This place that claims my midlife

labor is not an Eden I have made.

It is a place of trial.

My hope resides in yielding

to what calls me still to stay.

No charming serpent curls

about my arm and whispers

in my ear. But I am tempted

nonetheless. Like Homer

I take the stories of my people,

I give them shape, and hand

them down. What I pass on

is truth made new--half-truth

spun through kind invention.

The world I make is finer

than the world I know. How else

contain the bitterness, the pain,

the grief? I have not lied.

I say my words; I seek

the wholeness of the world.

Like Homer I am blind.

I see what is not here.

I see this place by word

and grace a new creation.

That word is what I've found.

That grace is where I live.

Art credit: water colors by Melody Knowles, 2012 

You can read what I wrote about his poem in 2012 here.

Grace and peace,

Virginia Knowles

P.S. My other poems from this year - 

• Disentangle
• Thunder Hole
• And Now I See 
• This is Where I Am in Time