No Half-lights

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

He sleeps and sleeps and sleeps.  He dreams and dreams

And dreams.  He sets his sonnets wide upon

An unsuspecting world.  His manna seems

To fall from heaven and from poets’ dawn.

His sonnets sing of Shelley, Shakespeare laced

With Lorca, and of Dalí dreamed up by

The East and West, by Zen.  He does not waste

His time on Eliot or Pound, their sly

Attacks on beauty, on their unrhymed lines,

Or any of their followers.  The Sin

Of deserts is beneath his mind.  He signs

In language spoken always by Christ’s twin.

  He scorns the love of women far beyond

    Men’s love.  He scorns those beauties that abscond.

~ Phillip Whidden