Friday, September 13, 2013

It is what people make of it, I suppose.
He came and spoke of poetry here
in the town of poets.  Not bad
for a sitting President.
Subtle fellow of exc'llent wit
and humor
to understand the true purpose
and the point.  To act
in terms of poetry
is to act in accordance
with the nature of things
and nature itself.
Those of us who share a gene within
of him, melancholy, Irish, grim--
we all do, for being
made of dust and
cut out of little stars--
wish his memory to pass on
with more than what the institution,
officered and official can politely
under its own strains, say
in its own band of the spectrum,
not to be too weird,
not to have to answer,
'what did you mean by that,
poetry as policy?'
Maybe you could get away with it,
back in Nineteen Sixty Three.

Leave the poet to say it:
He came here, to Amherst,
three weeks before his death,
and spoke of what he'd learned,
as if to sum it all up.
Ask what you can do for your country
and for poetry,
as we are all dying anyway, even as we live,
and so I am symbol, or teacher
of what you might be
as you walk upon the Earth,
your own days as grass.
Or sleep in the meaningless of life,
thinking that none of it
has inner poetry or
power of metaphor,
as did those who took him
from us.

Each village to an island grows,
John Clare's lines of rainy seasons,
"Winter in the Fens,"
goes.
No man's an island,
Donne's.
And our town's work,
its bread,
its offer to the world,
is done in poem,
Terras Irradiant.
Poetry is
in our bones.

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