Romanticism

 For some odd reason I first thought I'd save this to send, along with any other suitable candidates, somewhere to see it in print. There was a time when that was quite exciting, imagining oneself the sort of 'poet' that some editor somewhere thinks worthy of publication and maybe a few readers will think worth reading.

I don't know what came over me. By now such things matter very little. I enjoyed doing it, like it and so it's over. It can be made public here for as many as know where to look immediately without the months of waiting to see if it gets in and then for the hard copy.

I almost miss the hard-won poem that takes a lot of thought and work. By now, it seems, as soon as the idea arrives, the poem can be done in short order. Being a poet takes me not very much time at all. The time it really takes is the long months in between ideas suggesting themselves during which it seems no more ever will.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Romanticism

The monks had done their homework and so knew
there was nothing left to say. Everything
expanded inwards, contemplating time
and space well beyond the giddy limit.
You’d never hear the last of it. 

Nineteenth-century Romantics, in love
with picturesque decay, resplendent at
the height of fashion, longing for whate’er
they longed for, postured here eloquently.
Such neat Regency graffiti engraved
into the masonry, like where it says
1811, is artwork by now.

Keats aboard his boat to Naples, restless
with tuberculosis, would have missed it
above where the sea continues sparkling
like a melancholy summer
trying to defy its end.

Netley Abbey 1/9/22