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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

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Revisions, Revisions, Revisions: Or Are There Only Two?


As all my faithful readers know, I have pronounced it the Season of Revision. That's right! No new stuff until all of the old stuff is reviewed, revised, and published (Maybe?!?) I actually like the editing process because it gives me a chance to see how my brain was working over the past few years. Like many famous poets, I often complain about not having an new ideas or good ideas, but then I look in my Rough Draft folder on my flash drive, and I have 30 or 40 poems. I have even more than that in the Really Rough Draft folder. They seldom make it out. I guess that I will test your memory. Today, I have revised two poems completely and feel comfortable where I have them. See if you can remember how much or how little they have been changed from the original--which I am not going to provide.

As always, Enjoy!

A Cardinal Sin

(unus multorum)


As I lie brooding on my couch,

My senses are all at odds.

I feel that I have lost my touch

With what were once inspiring gods.

(Do I believe in other gods?)


I reckon the makers would be one.

I set no idols before them

Nor worship them as some have done

And in that honor abhor them.

(Who worships idols?)


No siren’s voice will persuade me,

Nor will I be tempted astray

By demons that warble a melody

In a naturally amorous way.

(Can I be seduced by song?)


One who is not against is for,

One who does not slander praises,

Who begs for nothing receives more

Than those who heap empty phrases.

(Are they singing for their supper?)


My cardinal sin is not too deep.

It is a faith I find in words,

A tiny confidence I keep

When I translate the singing birds.

(Have I betrayed the birds?)


By the way, "unus multorum" is Latin for "one of many."


A Song for Rain

(Inspired by but not much like P. Shelley’s The Aziola)


Trilling and trilling and trilling,

The thirsty tree frogs call.

The clouds are blanched light blue not black.

No drops are likely to fall.


The warbling bluebird at my sill,

His throat wrung dry as dust,

Sings wordless psalms to missing rains

Whose absence seems unjust.


Do rain drops fall on all alike?

That’s surely what I’ve heard.

Their sweetness rousing soil and soul

No song has ever stirred.


Far, far sweeter than any hymn,

Their chorus slakes the sky,

But when they do not sing for me,

I bow my head and cry.


Their music, I cannot forget,

Nor how their showers move me,

Dear rain drops show you love me yet,

Or find a way to prove me.


I shall be continuing with these revisions on a daily basis. By the way, are there any artists out there who would like to contribute some artwork to go with these poems? I think that would be cool. Also, as my faithful readers scan these revisions, how about you help me come up with a really attractive name for this collection? I think I will let my readers name the next book when and if I publish it.

Comentários


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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