---
title: "The Idea of Beauty (Spoke Itself)"
description: "Thank you to John MacKenzie and Selina Rajani--John for saying go ahead and Selina for packaging it up so nicely. The Idea of Beauty is one of my most favourite poems (and it's featured in..."
url: https://somisguided.com/2008/10/27/the-idea-of-beauty-spoke-itself/
date: 2008-10-27
modified: 2008-10-27
author: "Monique"
categories: ["Book Reviews"]
type: post
lang: en
---

# The Idea of Beauty (Spoke Itself)

Thank you to John MacKenzie and Selina Rajani–John for saying go ahead and Selina for packaging it up so nicely.

The Idea of Beauty is one of my most favourite poems (and it’s featured in *Sledgehammer*, published by Polestar). I heard John read this in the hallway at Raincoast Books and it has stuck with me.

**The Idea of Beauty (Spoke Itself) by John MacKenzie**

I have been waiting here for you since

the stars first leapt into the sky

since before there was water sprung from fresh rock

(its first & longest music a metronome —

beat after unvaried beat falling like hammers of zombied blacksmiths)

I have been waiting here where

there were no flowers & the rocks were sharp

the soil odorless & dense,

no air pockets, no tunnels of worms winding

under roots of grass

I have waited here as minerals & salts turned to algae & coral

in the factory din of water & wind

as the assembly-line sun flung super-cooled windsurfing dimetrodons

among giant treeferns & monochrome blossoms,

as prototype blood shifted towards red & DNA began its fall

from beautiful flux into fixity and self-replication

I have waited here glacially for you

as the whispery respiration of trees built air

while whole forests fell into peat bogs, became stones

while the beaded sweat of ancient lives accreted into diamonds

& the idea of beauty spoke itself in the lush green syllables of your eyes