Poetics

This is a poem that appears in the book, A Simpler Way, by Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner Rogers. The poem is by American poet, A. R. Ammons. Both the book and the poem continue to mean much to me when I think of the need to both let go and welcome emergence.

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Poetics

I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind glittering
totally its apparent self:

I look for the forms
things want to come as

from the black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:

not the shape on paper — though
that too — but the 
uninterfering means on paper:

Not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself 
through me
from the self not mine but ours.

Yes to emergence, letting go, and simplicity.