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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
Jan 16, 20232 min read

The Cave Opening


The Cave Opening


Some say a mouth.

I say a maw.

You have no lips

Nor jutting jaw.


I feel your breath,

But do you breathe,

Or do the rocks

Within you seethe?


From your gray chin

Seeps a fountain,

Drops of spittle

From the mountain.


I smell your scent,

Life, Death, and Birth,

The cool darkness

Of primal Earth.


I am intrigued,

But walk away,

I’ll plumb your depths

Some other day.


This cave opening pictured is above the falls at Steele Falls. I had never seen it before until Kellie and I hiked down to the falls a couple of weeks ago, and I noticed a faint trail going up to the top of the falls, which I erroneously thought merely meant that people wanted to see the falls from the top. When we climbed up on the rather steep and treacherous trail, I noticed warning signs all over a cliff face about fifty yards behind where the small stream plunges over the rock. I could not help myself. I had to see what the warning signs were about. Kellie did not go along with me because below the signs it looked like the cliff face had disintegrated into a mound of slippery rabble , and the rather square-shaped stones did roll and tumble down the slope as I climbed it. The picture I took shows the opening below the warning signs. Basically, the National Forest Service warns, "Do not climb into this cave and disturb the bats or introduce white-nose disease into their fragile environment." I did nothing more that take a few pictures, but there was a constant flow of cool, moist air boiling from the opening. I am positive the opening went down hundreds of feet into the darkness. The stream, by the way, seeps out of the rabble of stones thirty feet or so below the opening where I found a salamander sunning. I think I will write a poem about the salamander later. Anyway, in this poem, I suggest that I will explore the cave opening again some day, but, unless the National Forest changes its mind, I will not illegally enter a place that I am told I cannot enter. ENJOY!

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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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