Natal Grass

Plain as wicker most of the year

along October this tousled grass

wakes up on road verges in a smoke

of sago bloom, of ginger knots

tied in a shapeless woolly plasma

but get this web across the sun

and it ignites cut-glass rose

goblets and pitchers. In God's name

liquid opal from a parallel shore,

the dazzle of dew anytime of day.

                               —Les A. Murray  (1938- )

      from Taller When Prone (2011)

       (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

COMMENTARY

"[ . . .] we may say that the realms of being, as well as the objects within them, are never merely immanent, over their index of immanence there is always superimposed the index of embracing transcendence. If the Platonic symbolism is reformulated in this manner it reveals a crucial insight into the problem of objects and objectivity: Even when, in the climate of secularist epistemology, we believe ourselves to be safe from transcendence and to have immanent objects at hand, the humble object still is never god-forsaken but radiates transcendence in its immanent actus essendi."  Eric Voegelin, Late Unpublished Writings, Vol 28, 6.

It is curious to me that both texts capture the human resistance, the begrudgingness, and finally the release of wonder.

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