No Less Beautiful by Ed Hack

No Less Beautiful

So new and old, the stream that hurries by,
the hands of wind all over it and trees
that rock and shuush, like whispers from the sky,
go still, then murmur more, by wind released
to say what can’t be understood. Up there,
the clouds, white, passing shapes. They are. They’re not.
And blue is no less beautiful, though bare
and blank as unsaid words, as untied knots.
A hawk glides by like ice, a razor’s edge
that doesn’t leave a trace, and I’m all that
I did and didn’t do that’s long been etched
in others’ lives, my life become their fact.
The trees are whispering as dark comes on
an indecipherable, ancient tongue.

by Ed Hack

Editor’s Note: Regret and nostalgia meet up with startling imagery in this sonnet to describe a life that seems ordinary, but holds beauty nonetheless.