The New Zealand Poet Laureate blog

posted by Michele
The Way Is Is

That you love nature is easy to say
until you learn that unless you act accordingly
it will call you to account in the end.
                                                   That’s why
we’re required to make the connection
between the sound the wind makes
when it starts the leaves quivering
and the way the white canes of sunlight
line the spaces between the trees
on a summer’s morning.
                                   It’s a case
of working out what’s here
for the long haul
and if we want to be part of it.
It’s marvellous, abominable, confusing,
exultant: the way things are,
the way is is.

Brian Turner
From Footfall (Random/Godwit, 2005)