Agamya 2
“May your imagination know
The grace of perfect danger.”
Those are lines are from the poem, For the Artist at the Start of Day, by John O’Donohue, the warmhearted Irish poet and former priest who died in his sleep at just 52 seven years ago.
Writing this poem for anyone who spends their day making, O’Donohue begins with the essential invocation to slip clear of the “sticky web of the personal.” It comes with “its hurt and its hauntings,” he warns. Once past the perilous distractions of the quotidian, the possibility then opens up to find the “rhythm not yet heard,” that “calls space to/A different shape.”
But my favorite line in the poem is these five words: The grace of perfect danger. It is a phrase that is so concise but encapsulates an enormous idea. I have had that sense many times in my studio, where precariousness lives inside a canopy of exquisite, inviolate sureness. That essential tension was a feeling I knew in my body but could not describe in words. Until now.
Perfect danger, with grace. That’s it.
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Thank you Linda Crawford to sending the O’Donohue poem my way.
Deb, how much more rich the word”grace” for an ex-priest than even for us.
Lovely line. I also like the ending– “how deftly it fits/
About its secret loss” — which says so much to me.