Poems by Ellen McCarthy
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Not Only Earth
by Ellen McCarthy
From Canary Spring 2013
Ellen lives in the San Francisco Bay watershed, the most beautiful place she has ever seen.
This giant we stumbled on is
old, so old it was a sapling when
Rome fell and Aztec still was spoken
in these woods
where we stood, my friend
and I, staring skyward,
she in quiet prayer and I musing
whether life's dogged sundry forms
prove it must be sprouting
in countless starry gulches
of the Milky Way and far beyond
in ways an earthly brain can’t fathom.
We know Earth shimmers with a beauty
that’s finely tuned to human sensibility,
but not only human, and surely
not only Earth
© Ellen McCarthy