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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84
Sep 6, 20211 min read

A Golden Oldie from 39 Years Ago

Anyway, Kellie and I were walking in the city park at Salem early Saturday morning, and we both took a picture trying to capture the reflection of the trees in the water. She did a great job with hers. That is the picture you see either above or below. I can never quite tell where the picture is going to be in the blog.

It is Labor Day in the afternoon. I was thinking about taking a nap, but I decided that some of my readers may want something to read and think about. Well, here is poem that I originally wrote in 1983. A version of it is in The Purple and Blue Collection. I found a different version today. I did revise it a bit. The punctuation was terrible, and I changed maybe eight words to help the rhythm a bit. I guess I could not keep much of a beat when I was 17. Here, I thought all along that I was a great dancer back then. Enjoy!

Poetry

Originally written in 1983


As innocent as birds,

the robin or the sparrow

not unlike the river,

sometimes wide and elsewhere narrow,


Incapable of seeing,

its blunt dark eyes are blind,

sometimes it’s like a vegetable

Without a cynic’s mind.


It is sweet like sunshine

on golden buttered toast,

a tangy rack of ribs

Placed on the fire to roast;


A captivating montage

Of fruits and flowering trees

reminiscing through the mind

like a plummy summer breeze.


It does not shy from evil

And calls no act a sin,

except for shrouding beauty

Or the soul it lives within.


It puts the random world

In words pleasing to the ear.

Poetry speaks of life

And all that life holds dear.


Comments

I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

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