If poetry's a game,
today I'm not playing.
If poetry
'makes nothing happen';
if it only 'survives
in the valley of its own making.'*
Sorry, Auden,
I'm not playing.
I'm not up to lute
the wind and the rain,*
when my love has departed
by train and by plane.
Today I'm away with the fairies.
I'll take a Yeats express
by lugworm mouth
whose wavelets praise:
'Everything we know is change
within the cradle of the tides;
everything's a life, a death.'*
Poetry has changed hearts;
changed worlds
what else would set those
OCD so OTT so dominoes to fall;
and though it's nothing of a caul
it is the bee and blossoming.
..............
*from Auden's poem on the death of Yeats.
*from the end of Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night'
*that's just the lugworm within me talking.
