If poetry were pottery would
it break?
Not if you knew the way to
throw the clay and heat the kiln.
If verses could be scaled
and theorized like music
Would you practice every day
to get your rhythms right?
Yes, but now you have to
play it all by ear
And risk the tedious
thumping of a mangled air.
If lyrics were as dangerous
as mongrel dogs
Who bite the eyelids of
unwary toddlers down the road,
Would you dare to sing your
plaintive love
In public where the nymphs
and swains reside?
Not if you knew the secrets
of old prosody
And glided through the
aether with your oars of silk.
If epics mattered, heroes
splattered on the battlefield,
And goddesses presided over
pyres and lyres,
Would you still be chanting
after Virgil in the underworld?
Yes, but Milton could not
see and made his daughters read,
And Pope sat hunched up in
his grotto mumbling wit.
Today we think of poetry as
beyond all rules
And cherish inner feelings
more than precious jewels.
We take confession on a
crowded lawn,
We claim the rights of error
and won’t be drawn
To balance sense with
insight, ambience and dawn.
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