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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

The Third Cardinal Is Complete!

Anyway, I have finished the poem for the first request that I have received from a reader. I generally do not think it is fair to explain a poem before anyone reads it because it creates an influence or sensation that might not be there otherwise, but I would like to call your attention to the way that they poems speeds up and becomes chaotic with rhymes and hard "k," "t," and "s" sounds when the narrator (me?) is with the birds around the bird feeder and slows down whenever the narrator reflects upon difficulty of translating the experience of the birds into written words where there are fewer, if any rhymes, and a variety of sounds. If you find that in the poem, it is on purpose and not accidental at all. Read it aloud or have someone read to you. I think the effect is better that way. Enjoy!

The Third Cardinal Sin

(Or maybe some other number)


I sit inside and eye

Their nervous skittering,

The dance from branch to branch

That tests no bird’s mettle.


They all fly at the wind

Flicking the dry oak leaves

Or the stiff twigs clicking

On trembling frozen limbs.


I see the quick movements,

The swift light, bob, and leave,

Wastefully tossing seeds

To crisscrossed dirt beneath


Where shyer species eat

And avoid the shifting

Twisting rope-bound feeder

And off-red pointed beaks,


The pink seed-cracking beaks,

The ticking sounds they make,

The living sounds of birds

I cannot put in words.


I sneak outside and sit

Where I can hear them flit

And fly behind my ears

Never before my eyes.


I listen to rustlings,

Flutters, putters, tick-ticks,

Rapidly flapping wings,

Brittle nails on hard wood.


Words have no account for

The swish of rushing air,

I hear and clearly feel,

Right near my subtle ear.


I note the testy tweets,

“Chirrip, cheree, chee, chee

Tirreep, tirreep, toolee.”--

They say, “Don’t get near me.”


Fat chickens waddle up,

“Bok, bok, uh, er, cluck, cluck.”

They are beggars pleading

For a handful of scratch.


Those mad bully blue jays,

That I chase away, scream

“Yee haw, yee haw, yee hay.”

Stupid, bumbling burglars!


A red-tailed gray female

In a dead treetop shrieks.

I hope she gets to eat.

She may lay eggs in spring.


And suddenly, dark comes.

The wind is hushed and still.

The moon is on the rise.

Red birds huddle in boughs.


Silence requires no words

Nor sound. Cardinals sleep.

I may discover peace

In dreams of their blithe songs.



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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