Poetry by Robert Herbert

Centerpiece
Beauty permeates the world.
The faint ripples on water’s surface,
Sunlight emerging through and enhancing
The water’s effervescence, increasing its beauty tenfold.
Trees grow, filled root to leaf with functions borne of nature,
Of necessity.
The wind blows through these leaves, these trees,
These shrubberies, all to make the world more vivacious.
Sky lit snows shine and sparkle, a stark, protective blanket
To conserve what beauty these sights have to contribute to the world.
These wondrous wonders are of one type of beauty,
A beauty known to the naked, untrained eye,
Appreciated by all that happen to happen by.
There is another type of beauty, though,
One underground, underappreciated
That occurs to all that put forth the effort to observe it.
A shared moment, the meaning behind the action.
A mother’s embrace, not out of necessity or of superficiality,
But of some unsaid truth, some underlying motivator
That makes the heart explode, burn, impassion.
A gentle smile on the worst of days,
Because you know the difficulty of such a task,
But you do it anyway.
Because why make someone’s day dim and miasmic
When a simple “Fantastic!” can mean so much more,
Affect someone, something, for the better.
This unacknowledged beauty,
The beauty of not seeking acknowledgment,
Is beauty that, when found, can move, motivate, change.
You, my love,
You are the water’s ripples, the light from the trees, the wind,
The eternal effervescence of my life.
You epitomize this external beauty inconceivably.
But you are also an amalgamation,
A culmination of everything good, everything wondrous,
Everything “fantastic”.
You are inner and outer beauty made one, united,
Made eternal in this world we live in.
You are the centerpiece of nature’s brush strokes,
The focal point of beauty, a characterization of it.
You are you, and you are beauty, within and otherwise.
A Second Heaven

Passion is a versatile term

Used to reference two distinct kinds of heavens,
Both of which scream from the gleam in your eyes.
“The state or capacity of being acted on by external agents or forces”
(Merriam & Webster, 2016) divorces you from the term,
A definition too superficial to capture your depth.
Surely “The sufferings of Christ between the night of the Last Supper and his death”
Is alternatively too in-depth, too literal a form
To capture the complex, complete beauty in your essence.
No, the heavens I deliberate on are just that:
Deliberate.
“Intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction.”
Is a definition that characterizes you.
You imbue yourself and others with purpose,
Make people want, feel, thrive, drive, live.
You do so consciously yet without effort,
A single smile or glance a messiah to progressive action.
Without even a word, you inspire, impassion.
“Ardent affection”, the second heaven,
Characterizes the very actions deliberated on before.
Do you know why it was so easy to fall in love with you?
To woo is usually not such a trivial task.
Of course, your Aphroditic appearance
Could leave an army of men at your wake
Smiling gaily for the simple pleasure of walking where you once stood.
But you, through the course of your life
Have developed not only a drive,
But an affection that arrives
At the door of those worthy,
Those that are willing to accept your drive and drive with you.
I am proud to call myself the chieftain of the Army of the Fortunate,
Able to embrace with glee my own lovely goddess.
Our sweet embrace, though akin to euphoria, is not our ends,
But is connected, meant for something more.
Every tantalizing touch, which sends quakes down my spine,
Whines, cries for the love we’ve both been longing for.
But what is our “ends”? Our swan song?
Were we able to find each other in a throng of people
Based on fortune alone?
No. The reason we were fated to be was the meshing of our heavens,
Our ideals, hopes, dreams, drives.
The want not only for love, for each other’s love,
But to spread the idea of these loves, these heavens
So the would could live in the bliss we feel
When we feel each other’s tantalizing touches once more.
And therein, my dear, lies our answer.