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A Poem Is by David Braund
from Now We Are Five
A Poem Is
A poem is as fleet as a two-edged cow As slow as an orchid in June As distracting as radishes back to back As droll as an open balloon.
A poem’s not nothing but something as well O poem, you are and you’re not A poem is speechless but bursts into song A poem’s an unfinished knot
A poem is gasping for breath on the shore You may land it or drown it at sea A simile bent like a spent metaphor An aching desire to be
Its rhythms have driven it way way away Its rhymes or its reasons restrain it Picking its way through words it won’t say It seeks freedom but seeks to constrain it
It’s the African sun locked in the Arctic The nearness of nuclear frost The strength of a thin living envelope The making of what must be lost
The atoms are fractious, the quarks all awink The molecules teasing and sly The darkness has woken and started to blink consciousness rains from the sky
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A poem’s as slow as a two-edged cow As fleet as an orchid in June As distracting as radishes back to back As droll as an open balloon.
David Braund
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