"The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step." ~ Lao Tzu
Poetry’s Palace
By Connie Kerbs
Poetry preserves the silent sounds
Of a billion basking creatures
On a puzzled globe, outlined with
Sanded, rocky, living beaches.
Layers of life teem anonymous in tide pools,
Aching, thirsty, impatient for faithful return
Of the tide’s quenching, caressing, salty foam,
Ever ebbing and flowing mysterious reaches.
Poetry pauses time imperceptible
Between flutters of hummingbird wings
Flitting lively, vivid, pointy passengers
Ever piercing for succulent nectar.
Poetry’s heart throbs warm and deep
With fierce and ferocious motherly love
For tender offspring needing
A determined, devoted protector.
Poetry is the cascading fountain
Of outpouring, choking emotions
Overflowing at a field of flowers
Poppies blooming in bright blood-red
An endless, waving sea; nature’s monument
Of breathtaking beauty beyond belief
Grown from the bones of fathers, brothers, friends, and foes
Sown from the fallen, the heroic, the dear, decaying dead. *
Poetry eases anxious love with epic distraction
Refines the graffiti engraved on the lonely alone
Soothes obsessed separated lovers
Languishing under the same moon, a mile or oceans apart
Declares love’s ravenous, riveting passions in shameless proclaim!
Celebrates seasoned love’s inextinguishable, eternal flame
Consoles the silent, private weeping of grieving love lost, and
Poetry massages the hardened, and thaws the frozen heart.
Some think poetry a haunted, poorly lit mansion
Of rambling iambs in a dusty, cob-webbed bastion
Composed of elusive, cryptic, baroque reflections
Echoing tired and tedious, rhetorical, inherent questions.
But, poetry embraces the shunned, and rejects accepted objections;
While it loves tolerance of subtly obvious, agreed contradictions
Poetry reveals hidden deceitful truths in coerced freedom
It, indeed, masterfully marinates the melancholy to perfection.
Poetry is an oversized moon hovering on the horizon, mouth-dropping low
Boasting the sunset trapped inside as an encore to the show.
Poetry is a nation’s pride, generations deep.
Poetry is that place in between awake and asleep.
Poetry is a thicket of invisible crickets chirping their charming song, proud, and loud all the twilight night long.
Poetry is a grandma’s purpled hedge scenting the air with a sweet lilac trace.
Matured from starts started a lifetime ago, taken from her grandmother’s place.
Poetry is a world class symphony-orchestra whose hundred or so musicians in balance
Have collectively practiced a million hours shaping and honing their musical talents.
Poetry resides where justified pride no longer divides
And protective, selfish, seething, gritty grudges
Relax into resolutions and supple solutions, and
Anger, despair and grief are exchanged for a washing of feet.**
Poetry is an elegant, eloquent, safe and spacious – infinite – place of escape.
Where Descarte’ and Darwin take shortbread cookies and high tea together
With Freud and Marx, speaking in hushed voices about Galileo and Olga Bergholz, and Keats.***
With Shakespeare sublime, playing poesy in the background, at the divine, Poetry Palace Suites.
*Referencing famous WWII Poem In Flanders Fields by John McCrae.
**A Christian symbol for humility, as Christ demonstrated with his Disciples.
***Descarte: The Father of Modern Philosophy/Formally Reasoned for Diety
Darwin: Father of Evolution whose work has been used to argue against the case for Diety/Creation
Freud: Father of Modern psychology
Marx: Father of Sociology
Galileo: Pioneering Inventor/Father of Scientific Method & Modern Astronomy
Olga Bergholz: A poet whose work in Leningrad was a beacon of light for the survivors of the worst siege in human history.