a poem must start in stillness
a midge
writing on stagnant water
it must
become a meaning
a high
life in cool twilight
it must
be the line
they do
not know about
a
spinning wheel
a
spinning wheel
*
it must
be the lone headlight
on a
highway at 3 a.m.
it must
wrap itself round a tree
like a
rejected lover’s car
it must
hang from a bloody branch
like a
lynched saviour
it must
be the gold coin glinting
in the
stinking culvert
*
it must
glister in the crystal dawn
a
hungry red waking river
blundering
over pastry hills
like a
china rolling pin of day
quaint
as a nest in a skull:
of all
birds it is the sparrow
hopping
in counterpoint
on heaven’s
doorstep
a good poem is allergic to must
ReplyDelete(that could be a first line!)
I guess it could, but since I think it's impossible to come up with a formula for writing poems, the 'must' is meant to evoke the compulsion a poet can feel while writing — rather than saying what I think a poem 'should' be, like MacLeish in Ars Poetica, although even that is not decalogic.
Delete