Another Tongue

If passion speaks beyond self-centered will, if stones may cry aloud because a man keeps silence, or if whispers wash the mind as storms in springtime will refresh the earth, then it is poetry that feeds our hearts. At birth it is a soft caress that would protect and nourish thought in gentleness, to draw from deep within, a song that prose could not express, a sigh devoid of art that art alone may sing, the singer but an instrument, and that of conscious awe. All this, and still demanding to be heard, for if it were not so, we would not know or speak of poets; wars might then be just regretted or dismissed as lost for lack of strategy; arms would be taken up for power alone and men would then survive in shallow grief, insouciant within, a tired state of lethargy, where no one ever cares. The powers of heavenly places may be thanked, for muses dwell upon Olympus, not within the hell of circumstance, or haste, or juvenile romance-- for there is power indeed when insight travels where the lofty giants led and left upon their pages, majesty, and bled, and wept, and gave us beauty that device alone could only try to emulate, and fade away. ~