There’s No Royal Round Table for Second-rate Knights
Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem
The drops on berries, not real tears at all,
Are maybe not what readers want a line
To say in poetry. They want a crawl
To origins — yet falsity as shrine
Is like a bastard in the manger. Verse
May get away with it, but poetry
Must be as true as true or it will curse
Itself. A Galahad of chivalry
In literature, perhaps in life, is what
That writing or its speaking out in song
Must grasp. Why bother with the set down smut
Of failure? Poetry must be a prong.
The prong of purity of Galahad,
His lance, is for the soul its launching pad.
A Sonnet on the Highest Poetries
Not every reed may summon heaven’s swans,
Nor every brook translate the moon to wine;
The loftiest songs are laddered caravans
Where stars unpack their censer-smoke in pine.
They are not words but falcons forged of flame,
Whose wings beat gold from chambers of the mind;
Each stanza is a bell without a frame,
Yet rings through iron centuries behind.
The highest poems are orchards hung with suns,
Their apples ripened on the boughs of grief;
They yoke the antlered thunder no man runs,
And bind wild lightnings into sheaves of leaf.
Thus verse, at summit, is God’s hidden fire
Teaching dust-feathered clay itself desire.
0 Comments