Born of nowhere

Here's a favourite Norman MacCaig poem, taken from the pictured - and much loved - 2006 edited collection:


Things in Each Other

To fake green strokes in water, light fidgets,
A niggling fidget, and the green is there,
Born of a blue and marrying into blue
With clouds blushed pink on it from the upper air.

And water breathing upwards from itself
Sketches an island with blurred pencillings,
A phase of space, a melting out of space:
Mind does this, too, with the purse shapes of things.

Or the mind fidgets and a thought, grown green,
Born of nowhere and marrying nowhere,
Fakes a creation, that is one and goes
Into the world and makes its difference there.

A thing to be regarded: whose pure shape
Blurs in the quality of the noticing mind
And is blushed pink and makes the hard jump from
Created to creator, like human kind.

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Norman MacCaig (1910 – 1996)

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