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

No Arbiter Needed: A Short Poem

joybragi84
Aug 3
1 min read

I don't think that the ideas in this poem is hard to grasp unless you completely close your eyes to the issues. The ideas are inspired by various Bible verses: Isaiah 55:8, Ecclesiastes 11:5, and Job, beginning in Chapter 42 and on, verses, by the way, which tend to be ignored by most supposed Christians. As always, ENJOY!

No Arbiter Needed

We cannot reason eye-to-eye

When you abdicate your sphere

To a supernatural being

Whose motives are not clear,

When tragedy might be a test

Or a system to adjoint,

A symbol from old fairytales

To prove a struggling point,

When it works in arcane ways

And its thoughts are not like ours,

When it serves good and bad alike

With its omitted powers.

No, we cannot communicate

Till we make one thing clear.

I deal with you and you with me;

No gods need interfere.

If you care to send a prayer,

Let it be we both may keep

Our dealings based on what we know

Not ghosts that haunt our sleep.

I get a thing unknowable,

A form never reflected,

Whose schemes are indiscriminate

And always unexpected,

Whose terms demolish bad or good

On whims we all may toss,

And that is why neither you nor I

Want judgements from Chaos.

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

Michael Thomas Thoughts on Poetry, Short Stories, Essays, and Ramblings-It's All Here in...