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"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.

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