The Unknown Poet

The Unknown Poet

Whoever said
“Poetry is the release
Of accumulated misery”
Is only half right,
And may have been reading
The attempted poems of the very young—
The kinds of poets
who look out at the whiteness
Of a winter’s blizzard
And see only themselves in it—
Dripping in the sweet syrup
Of sentimentality
Or the acrid wit of cynicism—
Those who see nothing
Of the numinous
 Snowscape of the Soul.

And yet, there are those, like Whitman
Who release accumulations
Of miseries—
so overflowing
And so pointedly personal
They pour forth into the future
 as if to wake us from our sleep:
“You there, you holding me in your hands, 
right now, I see you!”
I blush, for my naiveté…

Fluent in the language of pain
He wrote words
Translating
The wounds of those
Who tried to soldier on 
In the war of brother against brother
He read those un-mailed letters home
 and un-finished poems
In the un-quiet wards of the city
Of men who lost their words
Like blood on snow…
Those un-recognized poets
Who created works of art 
never seen
To any, but him. 

And then there are the poets
Like Wordsworth   
Who wandered lonely as a cloud
 upon the flowered fields
Of lake-land England
Writing to remind us of
Our immortality
 and how
“Our birth is but a sleep 
and a forgetting”

While others, like Keats
Despite his short consumptive life— 
reminded us
that “Beauty is Truth,
And Truth is Beauty
That’s all you need to know….”

But —
Lest we forget—
the Irish poet, Joyce—
 Reminding us that the snow may come
to bury us all
In his words-worthy story of ‘The Dead’
And, perhaps, as if the words
 of unpublished poets
 Never fell like blood on snow…
On numinous landscapes…

And as if
 all the world 
simply rhymed…
and fell together
Like the gently falling snow 
covering us all…
Now and forever…
Amen.

Poem & Painting: Elizabeth Spring