Single-mindedness

“Five times as warm, and five times as cold, just as I am five times as rich as you are, and five times as clever.” ~ The Red Queen

      The old pond;
A frog jumps in —
The sound of the water.

Basho, Translated by R.H. Blyth

There’s nothing that you see that’s not a flower,

Says Basho, “Nothing you can think of not

The moon.”  The mind of Wordsworth whacks its power

From simple-mindedness, from Nature fraught

With calm, opaque philosophy.  Absurd

As all of this may seem to normal folks,

It’s sensible to poets, some, plain blurred

By sentiment.  Such “thinking” hotly stokes

The coals of single-mindedness in great

Ones.  Poem hormones flow in these beyond

The ordinary surge.  They won’t debate

With reason.  That is well beyond their pond.

  You love their poetry and if a Queen

    Of course you’ll grasp exactly what they mean.

~ Phillip Whidden