Seven short lines, and the whole poem hangs on one odd wish: not to see better, but to have someone else's eyes. Madi's "Iris." opens with that confession, "I wish for your eyes," and the grammar is worth a pause. The speaker doesn't ask to see what you see, or to be seen by you. They want the eyes themselves, as if sight were an object that could be handed over. Whether that is admiration, envy or love, the poem doesn't say, and the openness is part of its charm.
The reason comes at once: these eyes "notice the unseeable." "Unseeable" is a slightly strange word. "Unseen" would mean nobody happened to look, but "unseeable" means that looking ought to fail. So the wish is for a kind of attention that goes past ordinary vision. The title nudges the idea further. An iris is the coloured ring of the eye, and judging by the title, the "thin lines" of the next stanza may even echo the fine streaks that radiate through it. The word also names a flower, so the title may hold both seeing and something delicate to be seen.
The second stanza turns from wish to scene, and its first verb surprises. Eyes usually read or look, yet here they "trace the thin lines on paper after paper." Tracing is something a hand does, so seeing turns into making. The eyes copy, draw or follow, and they keep going. The phrase "paper after paper" piles up on the line the way the sheets pile up on a desk, and the repetition makes the patience felt rather than described.
Then comes a small grammatical jolt: "Till the stack has tipped over." It is a fragment, a clause that begins with a capital letter as though it were a sentence of its own. The stack has never been mentioned, but it feels as if it was always there, built by all that "paper after paper." The verb tense matters too. "Has tipped over" suggests nobody pushed it, and the work simply grew heavy enough to fall. The poem presents this as a natural result of devotion, not a disaster.
The sound of the lines changes as the pages loosen. "Till," "stack" and "tipped" are clipped and hard, full of t's and k's, the sounds of something being stacked up and held in place. After that the vowels open: "fly away," "Dance along." The most carefully placed word is the "and" that ends the line "And all the sheets fly away and." The line breaks off on a conjunction, so the reader's eye drops to the next line just as the sheets drop out of their pile, and the enjambment enacts the scattering. Then "Dance along with the wind" arrives. The phrase "along with" is gentle. The sheets aren't snatched away but join in, like partners.
There is no rhyme, and a rhymed ending would have felt like a lid. Instead the poem is free verse in two uneven blocks: a two-line stanza for the wish, a four-line stanza for what the wish would produce. The short lines keep an almost whispered pace, with no line trying to be grand.
What makes the poem worth reading is the kind of attention it admires. The wished-for eyes are not greedy. They notice what can't be seen and put in the slow, repeated work of tracing it, yet the outcome is not a neat archive. The record spills out into the air and turns into movement. One reading is that the speaker envies a person who can look so closely and still let go. Another is that the "unseeable" can never be pinned down on paper anyway, and the poem finds joy in that failure. Either way, in a handful of plain words, Madi gives the reader a picture of careful looking that ends in release.