True Grace

 

“I have seen such beauty as one man has seldom seen;
therefore will I be grateful to die in this little room,
surrounded by the forests,
the great green gloom of trees my only gloom
- and the sound, the sound of green.

Here amid the warmth of the rain,
what might have been is resolved
into the tenderness of a tall doom who says:
'You did your best, rest -
and after you the bloom of what you loved
and planted still will whisper what you mean.'

And the ghosts of the birds I loved,
will attend me each a friend;
like them shall I have flown beyond the realm of words.

You, through the trees, shall hear them,
long after the end calling me beyond the river.
For the cries of birds continue, as
- defended by the coretege of their wings -
my soul among strange silences yet sings.”

~Edward James

Painting by Rene Magritte, The Pleasure Principle: Portrait of Edward James (1937)