Beauty in the Dark.

My very favorite poem is an inarguably terrible one. I do not know its name and do not care to find out if it has a name. The only way I can find of reading it is in its original Instagram post, typewritten for no real reason on a sheet of creme colored paper, with a black and white photograph and a crystal for that extra touch of performatism. The contents of the poem are nonsensical, and to my knowledge, there is no logical way of understanding the twelve words that make up its length. 

The poem is by the Instagram-based poet (you could not torture the word instapoet out of me), Wider, and reads “And I learned that  / Even flowers can be / Beautiful when it’s dark.” The obvious confusion comes from the unusual placement of the word even, suggesting that flowers are not usually beautiful, and that their beauty in the dark is a rare exception. “And I learned that / Flowers can be beautiful / Even when it’s dark.” would be a much more reasonable way to write the poem, and would also completely ruin the poem.

The best words to describe the poem with, and the words that I strive most to achieve in my own writing, are ‘superficially beautiful.’ Beautiful words with nothing else to them. The lines  “...Even flowers can be / Beautiful when it’s Dark” suggest fields of flowers, lonely flowers in potted plants, flowers growing out of cracks in walls, all in the sacred dark, all performing some act forbidden to them called beauty, and performing nothing else but beauty. The flowers are not sending any kind of message or provoking any kind of thought, as are widely and wrongly thought to be the purposes of a poem. The flowers are just being, and being beautiful, and we readers are free to watch them being beautiful, or free to look away.

Then there is the first line, “And I learned that…” suggesting some speaker, a guest in the sacred darkness, observing the flowers in their ritual of forbidden beauty, learning for the first ever time, that Even flowers can be / Beautiful when it’s dark. We, readers of the poem, have not learned this. We have not seen what the speaker has seen, and so we have no true understanding of what it means for a flower to be beautiful in the dark, however beautiful we might already think flowers to be.

I’m sure by now I seem crazy. What I really mean to get at is that any certain combination of words whose sole ability is to sound beautiful, whose only layer, and therefore whose deepest layer is its surface level elegance, has the unique ability to isolate beauty, and show us what beauty looks like alone, naked, nearly invisible, in the dark.