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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
Jul 23, 20232 min read

A New Nature Poem (?) And Some Random Pretty Pictures of Nature


Comments after another picture and the poem. Enjoy!


Sing Along Like All the Other Birds


That a dove taking to wing

Is a most poetic thing

Are words I think

I have no need to say.

Past poets, some who sing,

Have been plucking at that string,

And adding words

Would just get in their way.


Most moments trapped in time

Have been netted there in rhyme,

And bardic baits

Are sorely overused,

And lately, it’s a crime

To imprison the sublime

In rhythmic lines

Without being abused.


So, what am I to do

When an awe-inspiring view

Motivates me

To write down some words?

Should I forfeit what is true

When I have nothing that’s new

Or sing along

Like all the other birds?


Well, the poem is not really a poem about nature, but about the problems with writing poems about nature that have any sort of originality. Also, while most of my readers seem to appreciate my poems more when the are metrical and rhyming, I think that most of you are also aware that rhymed, rhythmic poetry has been on the "outs" for many decades. Though I do not regularly submit poetry to journals and magazines anymore, when I do, I am quickly and clearly that they are not looking for traditional, formal verse but prefer more contemporary styles. As I have said before, Walt Whitman was writing unrhymed, non-metrical free verse in the 1840's or earlier. Free verse is not a contemporary verse, and it IS traditional.


Anyhow, I will continue to write as I do as the mockingbird in my yard continues singing like every other mockingbird has for centuries.


I took the picture at the top of the page of the swallowtail on our Hosta blooms. Kellie took the picture of the sunrise on our daily morning walks. She also took the picture of the maroon caterpillar that follows the last paragraph.


Finally, it is getting that time of year when I am feeling like writing poems at requests. I haven't had a request in what seems like forever. The most read blog that I have had is the poem that I wrote at the request of Missy Dayberry. Somewhere around 60 different people read that blog. Most of my blogs have about 20 different readers. Whoops! I should say "poetry" blogs. Fewer people read the travelogue. I hate to sound like a beggar, but if you enjoy this blog, please share it with others. Anyway...here is this Kellie's awesome picture of the maroon caterpillar.



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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