Good and great art
Are the expression of emotion and evaluation,
Flowing up first from the feelings and fantasies of the fevered heart,
Then shaped and structured by the intelligence and experience
In the world-holding mind—
Touched with five types of beauty:
Sometimes soft and gentle and sweet beauty,
Such as in moonlight and roses and snowflakes;
Sometimes rough and raw and grating beauty,
Such as in beach-sand, shale, and igneous rock;
Sometimes magnificent and powerful and dangerous beauty,
Such as in tigers and ocean-waves and lightning-flashes;
Sometimes tender and loving—or hot and heating—beauty:
Such as in enchanting erotic fire and love’s desire—
Or in the beatitude it can bring: a mother cherishing a new precious life.
And sometimes dark and deadly beauty,
Like a black widow spider’s patent-leather shine.
And like her turned hour-glass, blood-red,
That shows blood-drops of life, well fed.
And that shows the changing sands of time, that filled and fled.
Often two or three or four of these kinds of beauty, at once--or all five.
This vital expression is what good and great art are.
This is what makes art, like life itself, alive.
The human heart,
Glowing with the light kindled by life in the dust of a star—
Mixed with mind, which is stardust set aflame with life—creates art.
With writing, painting, sculpture, dance, music, song, and poetry:
Time-bound mortality stretches out its thirst to touch eternity.

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Written by Michael LP                                        
aka Mr. Poet, aka PWC, aka MLP
Copyright © 2010 by M.L.P. All rights reserved