(a little bit of fluff for day 4.)
lost poets
let's round up all the lost poets
who shuffle their pyrrhic feet
through this neighbourhood
while we work or sleep,
who hunker under foreign porches
in the rain and pull up flowers
they haven't planted but deem
sublime and worthy
of only their own unique attention
they roam with open notebooks,
trailing feral rhyme and unbroken lines
no one has posted their photos
on streetlamps, no handbills list
their publishing histories or nervous tics --
there's no reward
but we'll recognize them by the jackets
of out-of-print books and lure them
to the back door with talk
of free verse or wine
we'll line them up, flush left,
and sharpen their pencils
2 comments:
I'm too tired to have any actual helpful notes, but I wanted to note that I like how 'pyrric' here could be both "an ancient Greek dance imitating the motions of warfare" and also "a metrical unit with unstressed - unstressed syllables."
who hunker under foreign porches
in the rain and pull up flowers
they haven't planted but deem
sublime and worthy
of only their own unique attention.
Very nice. Poetry is a real yard-sale, scavenger sort of a business, isn't it?
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