Possibilities as Exotic as Zanzibar

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

These things I might have been:  streaked tourmaline

Stone baked and crushed in lava, or stringed pearls

So ancient that they might have draped a queen

Like Cleopatra, or those starburst swirls

In farthest space, or somewhere in the mind

Of Plato, diamond on a ring, or ring

Round Saturn, or a vision in a blind

Prophetic brain where tortured forecasts sing,

Tiresias before his monarch, god

Or goddess even, conjured by the need

Of humans to deny the truth, that odd

Beggar Buddha passed dreaming up his creed —

Potentials numberless both wide and far

And even Freddie Mercury’s guitar.

~ Phillip Whidden