“The Poet”~by Michael Graves

 

 

“The Poet”

I am the poet. I live
the holy nightmare.
I travel the ecstatic transition.

For me, the light bends differently.
The rainbow radiates a vibrant symphony
in the key of red-orange
or some other hue.

Magnificent choirs resound from within
the vast tumble of clouds, hanging
in the morning sky, changing
with the shifting light; harmonically sifting
the colors as the sun rises and echoes
brilliantly off the far mountains.

I am the poet. Verse grows
within me, pulsating with life.
Greedy for its own existence.
And forth it comes, skipping gaily or
strutting murderously, as I
in sweet agony of creation, give birth.

I am the poet. A blink
in the wrong direction takes me
to places which are not earthen lands, but
vistas where hope is a particular shade of light.
And rage is a cool breeze on an autumn
afternoon under blazing, red flames of dead leaves.

I am the poet. I see
divinity in snowflakes, and civility
in blood-red rivers of rebellion.

I throb yet, from a love a thousand years past.
And your hot breath across my throat
still haunts me.
And burns.

I am the poet. The ordinary
and the fantastic sit side by side at a table
in a falling raindrop.

A lifetime is lived in a pointed blade
of grass that floats for a moment
on the wind, and then
rushes downstream to rot
on some foreign
shore.

There, to begin again.

–Graves 6/30/17