What Poetry Means To Them

Poetry means a clean sheet of paper to the anxious poet. He covers the dry page with moist words, squeezed from his heart's vocabulary. But children romping on the playground tear the paper to shreds and fling the pieces into bright air. They drift down like big snow-flakes which will never melt. Poetry means the nagging memory of the lost one in the surviving one, always two on either side of death, both waiting for their next embrace. For our grandparents, spying on the seasons as they shift and glide, poetry is the slow rhythm of the mantle clock. For the thinker, poetry lingers in the space between her widening thought. For the lone lover and the perfect fool, it measures the time desire burns. Everyday they show us poetry is nothing but a gasp, a breath breathed into surrounding air, a cry that echoes again and again, the soft touch of a hand we never see.