Constantly Risking Absurdity

Honoré Daumier

The Reading of a Poem

Constantly Risking Absurdity

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of the day
performing entrechats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence

~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti ~

My Husband Discovers Poetry

Luigi Lucioni

Rose Hobart

My Husband Discovers Poetry

Because my husband would not read my poems,

I wrote one about how I did not love him.

In lines of strict iambic pentameter,

I detailed his coldness, his lack of humor.

It felt good to do this.

Stanza by stanza, I grew bolder and bolder.

Towards the end, struck by inspiration,

I wrote about my old boyfriend,

a boy I had not loved enough to marry

but who could make me laugh and laugh.

I wrote about a night years after we parted

when my husband's coldness drove me from the house

and back to my old boyfriend.

I even included the name of a seedy motel

well-known for hosting quickies.

I have a talent for verisimilitude.

In sensuous images, I described

how my boyfriend and I stripped off our clothes,

got into bed, and kissed and kissed,

then spent half the night telling jokes,

many of them about my husband.

I left the ending deliberately ambiguous,

then hid the poem away

in an old trunk in the basement.

You know how this story ends,

how my husband one day loses something,

goes into the basement,

and rummages through the old trunk,

how he uncovers the hidden poem

and sits down to read it.

But do you hear the strange sounds

that floated up the stairs that day,

the sounds of an animal, its paw caught

in one of those traps with teeth of steel?

Do you see the wounded creature

at the bottom of the stairs,

his shoulders hunched over and shaking,

fist in his mouth and choking back sobs?

It was my husband paying tribute to my art.

~ Diane Lockward ~

An Attempt At Unrhymed Verse

Milton Avery

Girl Writing

An Attempt At Unrhymed Verse

People tell you all the time,

Poems do not have to rhyme.

It's often better if they don't

And I'm determined this one won't.

Oh dear.

Never mind, I'll start again.

Busy, busy with my pen...cil.

I can do it if I try--

Easy, peasy, pudding and gherkins.

Writing verse is so much fun,

Cheering as the summer weather,

Makes you feel alert and bright,

'Specially when you get it more or

less the way you want it.

~ Wendy Cope ~

In Memoriam A. H. H., Section 5

Rockwell Kent

Burial of a Young

In Memoriam A. H. H., Section 5

I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold;
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given outline and no more.

~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson ~