Variations on a Theme

I am no poet
Striving in fields of rhyme and metre
To harvest truth from fresh-mown words.
And yet, and yet
Perhaps with careful sowing in well-tilled earth
Pampered into ridges and furrows,
Or seed rough tossed on soil in fractal scatterings,
A crop might be gathered in
To fill my barn with grains of beauty
And meaning, its syllables and caesurae soon
Kneaded and baked into doggerel bread
For the autumn feast.

***

I set a course to read and write a poem per day,
To distil an image into words that sing and dance,
Blown in on squalls of metaphor carrying meaning in their sway,
And thereby move my readers’ hearts with any luck – or chance.
And so transcend the scrape of nib on page
And open windows wide onto the world and time,
Or shine a light on beauty in the soul, and age
Gracefully, though writer founders on the shoals of rhyme.