Bringing the height of romance down to size,
eye level say, you see what’s missing is water
meant to quench a body’s incessant thirst
where the dry forest, nearby, looks easy to find.
Poetry is about to disappear for word weavers
whose thread is prose woven with a loom
in the room where I wrote poems,
where Betty no longer wove wall hangings.
Because high romance is too much to bear,
we have our good sense, our sheer acumen
expanding moonlight to view how others
find tricky little phrases for their verse
that never drills holes in quest of water,
no steel-whorled auger biting through rock,
and Betty long gone took her loom with her,
I stayed with the gig in smaller quarters.
Any cadence resembles a death-knell
where a love of life is expendable
and water over the falls great peril
when elephants trumpet the herd to bathe,
a pride of lions tires of being observed,
giraffes look wherever they want but down,
tourists recite pretty little verses
aping Kipling’s white-man’s burden.
(28 March 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
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