If You Are Here

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

“If you are here, I’ll leave all else behind” [or something like that] ~ Sergei Yesenin

“Love alone makes me remember.  Love alone makes me alert.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci

“If there’s no love, what then?” ~ Leonardo da Vinci

If you are here, I’ll leave all else behind,

My sonnets, all my poetry, my death.

My death won’t matter.  Love like mine is blind

As suicides that hang and have no breath

Beneath the water pipe as hard as ice

Siberia can muster.  Death does not

Imply the loss of poetry.  The vise

Of death grips all far grimmer than the taut

Requirements of the sonnet, villanelle

And terza rima.  Purgatory shows

Two ways, the way to Heaven and from Hell,

With deaths forever in their black light glows.

  We enter death at last somehow, some way.

    Its method doesn’t matter.  It eats prey.

Sergei Yesenin

© Phillip Whidden