Forgive me if my words aren’t to your liking,
but don’t forgive me if I use them poorly.
Skill should never answer to opinion,
nor skill be mistreated by the poetaster’s hand.
Poetry is one of the most difficult things to write
exactly because it seems so easy.
Its lack of rules, and that excess of freedom,
demands utmost patience on the part of her lovers…
She provides a banquet feast
by creating nothing from loaves and fish.
In the maelstroms of heat and fancy,
her one, cool word is a thousand wisdoms expressed;
a treatise of eloquence to the minds of the initiated.
For the greatest of mysteries stands back to back
with common observation:
How something, little more than a play of words, really,
Can bring hearts to the point of transformation,
and return souls to the awful silence of their first day.
but don’t forgive me if I use them poorly.
Skill should never answer to opinion,
nor skill be mistreated by the poetaster’s hand.
Poetry is one of the most difficult things to write
exactly because it seems so easy.
Its lack of rules, and that excess of freedom,
demands utmost patience on the part of her lovers…
She provides a banquet feast
by creating nothing from loaves and fish.
In the maelstroms of heat and fancy,
her one, cool word is a thousand wisdoms expressed;
a treatise of eloquence to the minds of the initiated.
For the greatest of mysteries stands back to back
with common observation:
How something, little more than a play of words, really,
Can bring hearts to the point of transformation,
and return souls to the awful silence of their first day.