“Monet’s ‘Waterlilies'” by Robert Hayden:

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

(From The Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher  1970 by Robert Hayden. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Painting of waterlilies by Claude Monet, circa 1915, via Wikimedia Commons)