0124 A Dead Poet Comments On 'Comments'

Erstwhiles, of candle-laboured hours and screwed-up eyes, the quill scratch-scratching, the paper ragged rough, the ink unwieldy, black and unredeeming as a judge’s cap – fame – or barely fame, the least to be hoped for, a mere ‘name’ – a mere sheet of scrawled, curled paper passed around a smoky coffee-house: they so shrewd of eye and savage oft of wit; or at the best, the whim of jobbing printer: then, fame or forgetting lay beyond this life. The grave’s a humbling, private place where even poets labelled ‘metaphysical’ begin their education quite anew… and yet, and yet - some centuries ahead, some divine post-classic irony may devise a means of universal access to poems quite unread (alas, and oft unread their readers too…) and so, humbled by cold grave and death, there’s one more humbling yet to bear: the stripling’s comments on a verse that lives, the poet – would he know it – dead: ‘Not so great – keep writing’… raising in these bleachwhite bones and grimjaw skull the faintest meta-physical, unseen ghost of a smile