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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
Apr 2, 20232 min read

A Newly Revised Poem and Pictures by Kellie


I don't know that I am prepared to call my friend Patrick Gillespie my "editor" yet--I don't know if he wants to be--, but we have been working on revising the following poem, the introduction to my next book of nature poems, off and on for over a month. Now, we have not been working together every day, but we have conversed via email occasionally, and the poem has gone through several significant changes, including a title change. For curiosity's sake, I have provided the original after the revised version and a picture. If you like the original better, I would really be interested in knowing why.


The pictures for today's blog were provided by Kellie. They were taken during our daily walks wherever we happened to be walking the park, the fairground, the river park, etc. As always, ENJOY and let me know what you think about the poems, pictures, or my thoughts.


Nature’s Boy

I sing as easy as the wind,

I rival the brook in its babble,

I pollinate a willing mind,

Yet all that I do is dabble.


I trill in trees with raucous birds,

I shoal with glimmering fishes,

I look to Nature for my words

And she gives them as she wishes

Her essence moves in motes and beams

Collected, reflected, and free

To mix and toil within my schemes

And wake inert spirits in me.

So, please excuse my feral rhyme,

My half-wild words, and blind guessing,

For I keep beat in Nature’s time

And only write with her blessing.



A Nature Boy


I sing my songs like breathless wind,

I shush the brook in its babble,

I pollinate an inspired mind,

Yet the most I do is dabble.


My words lay brown on barren ground

In the dust rain rinses to wash.

Ocean-bound, infused with sound,

On distant shores, they rise and splash.


I grow and wave, blossom and sigh

To picket the post that I keep

Watching the sky with vigilante eye

Till evening comes and I fall asleep.



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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