Truth is necessarily loved in such a way that those who love something else—besides her—wish that other thing to be truth. Since they are unwilling to be deceived, they are unwilling to be convinced that they have been deceived. –St. Augustine
If I could read every word
of Neruda or Dizdar
in the Spanish or Bosnian
but could not write
I would be nothing
but an iPad alert
during the opening
bars of the Largo
in Dvořák’s 9th.
If I employed a perfect hermeneutic
and could explicate Blake
or Lennon’s walrus gumboot
but could not rhyme or verse
I would not justify
a column inch.
If I donated my proceeds to charity
or my estate endowed the Academy
yet I had not the Gift
my words had all
been vain.
Poetry takes its time
and gives yours back to you.
Poetry seeks not itself
but to increase the world’s richness.
Poetry cannot be made to yield
what it and you do not possess.
Poetry is no record of wrongs
though it may well concern sorrow
or your grievous pain.
It is the crucible of beauty and truth.
Poetry persists.
It believes all things of all things.
It foreshadows redemption.
Poetry never fails;