Poems About Poets Ii

Poems about Poets Elemental by Michael R. Burch for and after Dylan Thomas The poet delves earth’s detritus—hard toil— for raw-edged nouns, barbed verbs, vowels’ lush bouquet; each syllable his pen excretes—dense soil, dark images impacted, rooted clay. The poet sees the sea but feels its meaning— the teeming brine, the mirrored oval flame that leashes and excites its turgid surface ... then squanders years imagining love’s the same. Belatedly, he turns to what lies broken— the scarred and furrowed plot he fiercely sifts, among death’s sicksweet dungs and composts seeking one element whose scorching flame uplifts. At Wilfred Owen’s Grave by Michael R. Burch A week before the Armistice, you died. They did not keep your heart like Livingstone’s, then plant your bones near Shakespeare’s. So you lie between two privates, sacrificed like Christ to politics, your poetry unknown except for that brief flurry’s: thirteen months with Gaukroger beside you in the trench, dismembered, as you babbled, as the stench of gangrene filled your nostrils, till you clenched your broken heart together and the fist began to pulse with life, so close to death. Or was it at Craiglockhart, in the care of “ergotherapists” that you sensed life is only in the work, and made despair a thing that Yeats despised, but also breath, a mouthful’s merest air, inspired less than wrested from you, and which we confess we only vaguely breathe: the troubled air that even Sassoon failed to share, because a man in pieces is not healed by gauze, and breath’s transparent, unless we believe the words are true despite their lack of weight and float to us like chlorine—scalding eyes, and lungs, and hearts. Your words revealed the fate of boys who retched up life here, gagged on lies. US Verse, after Auden by Michael R. Burch “Let the living creature lie, Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely beautiful.” Verse has small value in our Unisphere, nor is it fit for windy revelation. It cannot legislate less taxing fears; it cannot make us, several, a nation. Enumerator of our sins and dreams, it pens its cryptic numbers, and it sings, a little quaintly, of the ways of love. (It seems of little use for lesser things.) Keywords/Tags: poet, poets, poetry, poems, write, writing, inspiration, muse, art, Dylan Thomas, Wilfred Owen, W. H. Auden