Saturday 1 December 2012

Poetry: A Conversation


-         Poetry is anarchy,
Writing without rules.
-         Which of us thinks this may be?
None but bloody fools.

-         Is it not perverse (or worse?)
To throttle free expression?
-         Admonish not in terms so terse,
We jostle with shadows, illusions.

-         A poet’s mind, none may bind
With scansion, rhyme and metre.
Such are but tools, as you may find
In any craftsman’s atelier.


-         The words do dance as, in a trance,
Inspiration wells like happy tears.
-         Press not intellect into abeyance;
Calm thought suspended kindles fears.

-         You mock me here, so austere,
Oh flinty Wordsworth to my wan Keats.
-         You appear to be, apprentice seer,
Consummate acrobat of linguistic feats.

-         Poetry is incendiary;
To inflame the heart of man.
-         Liturgy, synergy, pathways to infinity,
Are the poet’s true domain.

-         Poetry is propinquity:
The queasy thrill of vaulting desire.
-         Kinder still is obliquity;
Truth in experience is ever mired.

-         Poetry is threnody;
Empathy, entropy: a cry wrung out of darkness.
-         Life is as the hand-wove Kashmiri;
God-wrought, flawed: extraordinariness.

-         Poetry is feeling, emotions reeling,
A divine charter warranting the senses.
-         Contemplation rather, inward-seeing;
The rendered world in contorting lenses.

-         Then how are we to ‘wrap’ this ‘rap’,
For conflict makes me weary?
-         We are the infant in Nature’s lap,
 The innocent dream of the Apothecary.