Watermark, oh watermark, you lie there in wait,
Signaling an inner identity ready to pass thru our gate.
Watermark, oh watermark, what mystery lies in store,
You are our anchor; we steer our ship with your oar.
Within every answer lies the watermark of a question.
We make assertions about everything we ask in our lives,
Without fully realizing their truth beyond mere suggestion,
Hoping the answers we discover won’t have us reaching for knives.
Within every decision lies the watermark of free will;
We make valued choices every day with consequences to distill.
No one can tell us how to be true to ourselves and wise,
Only we can choose wrongly, leading to our own demise.
Within the course of our life lies the watermark of truth;
We humans pursue this vision with the tenacity of a sleuth.
Truth shines forth with a color that at first appears strange,
Until we appreciate its veracity and its all-encompassing range.
Within every mind lies the watermark of rightful thinking;
It stirs our imagination into acting justly without blinking.
The virtues of patience and generosity lie silently in wait,
With a host of other virtues filling empty spaces on my slate.
Within every mystery lies the watermark of the unknown.
We lift every leaf to discover the beauty of the known.
Mystery flows thru the universe like threads in a tapestry.
Fresh wonder invigorates the creation with its innate majesty.
Within every secret lies the watermark of an endearing trust,
An intimacy that encircles us with the smell of enchanting musk.
Woven into the very texture of my sinews and bone,
I gladly journey thru life with the trust of a rolling stone.
Within the body lies the watermark of the quantum world,
Protons and neutrons swirl around a nucleus utterly whirled,
With micro-vision the physics of our watermark would be clear,
Solving a mystery that for centuries led us thru anxiety and fear.
Within every person lies the watermark of the human soul,
The divine imprimatur that makes every individual whole.
Without this watermark, we would sink into the depths of the earth,
Mindless matter destined to crumble from the time of our birth.
Watermark, oh watermark, pulsating with an inner glow,
Watermark, oh watermark, pristine as winter’s first snow.
In the watermark of my mirror lies a mysterious face,
Full of compassion and benevolence, and yes, full of grace.
A deep and smoothing treatise on a subject I've never before entertained with such open-mindedness. There is so much to glean from your well crafted metaphor that it will now be cataloged in my personal thesaurus of multilayered meanings to life. Thank you for posting.
While Alexander as given your poem great praise, I find myself differing. My estimation of the meaning of a watermark is something placed on paper to distinguish it as genuine and also something that is left over after high water is reached, more likely after a devastating flood than a life achievement. I think that the life achievement idea is what is attempted in the poem. My primary problem is the length of the poem and the stretch that was taken to create a rhyme every time. The lessons within all the stanzas are commendable.
this lovely arranged piece written in the best manner of the author's verbal creation and word coinage is focused on the term with a double meaning; hence some rope. It's all about "the meat and bone" (the heavier bone the greater significance) or "fruits and flowers" in all and everything, the proper proportion of which makes those rare things be closer to flawlessness; this poem is one of their number. Cheers, alex
Robin Ouzman Hislop's poetry is certainly in dialogue with some of the key architects of the 'poetics of indeterminacy' – both the Modernist strands represented by the likes of Beckett and Stein, and the postmodernist strands represented, initially,
The songs and art in this book are about our collective emergence after the pandemic and trauma of the last few years - comprised of 5 collections: World as Refuge, Where We Live, In Our Hands, Rhythms of Change and What We See & Sow.
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