Daily Poetry Readings #125: Somewhere I Have Never Travelled by E E Cummings | Dr Iain McGilchrist

Part 125 of a daily series of readings of his favourite poetry by Dr Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary. Today’s poem is Somewhere I Have Never Travelled by E E Cummings.

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~ Somewhere I Have Never Travelled by E E Cummings ~

Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond
Any experience, your eyes have their silence:
In your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
Or which i cannot touch because they are too near

Your slightest look easily will unclose me
Though I have closed myself as fingers,
You open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(Touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

Or if your wish be to close me, I and
My life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
As when the heart of this flower imagines
The snow carefully everywhere descending;

Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
The power of your intense fragility: whose texture
Compels me with the colour of its countries,
Rendering death and forever with each breathing

(I do not know what it is about you that closes
And opens; only something in me understands
The voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.