Poems for Contemplation: "The Slow Pleasures"

This summer The Well is featuring a series of poems by women. Ruth Goring invites you to approach them curiously and meditatively

The Slow Pleasures

by Luci Shaw

So, the words come slowly, like
the minutes in an hour, or even
the hours in a day — one by one.

In the cave of your mouth they taste
like oranges, green melons. Each offers its own
tang, its own unhurried flush that glazes

your tongue. A delicious vowel flourishes
there, rounding, a flame struck by the match of
a fricative, a plosive, a sibilant — C, V, P, S, T, Z.

Each mouth sound knows this is not its end;
that even after being swallowed,
mated, subsumed, essences persist.

For now, let them re-echo in porcelain,
crimson, onion, ivory, ovary, zither.
Allow each the slow pleasure of being.

Photo by Dan Gold from StockSnap.