“Sweetness”, Stephen Dunn

This is a damn good poem. I hold onto this.

That’s the only poem for today, really. Today, I am thinking about acceptance. Acceptance of self, of path as I turn toward grad school and graduation and such, and accepting that I’ve no clean and perfect solution and that one probably doesn’t exist and I doubt I’d really want it if it did. I feel it beginning to slip over me.

I am not an envious person. I have never been envious of butterflies. Bugs, too, sure, colorful, but impersonal all the same.
But all of a sudden, watching them float on a breeze, dancing from flower to flower or naught, now wings outstretched now beating clumsily, almost human in their folly and grace. Imagine that.
I wonder that my life would feel any less fulfilling were I to spend it trying to emulate a butterfly, not the act of being, but just to experience that floating, that beating, that delicate balance made explicit. All life is but ambivalence.