The Real Poets

THE REAL POETS The real poets are few in number and largely known by name The rest of us are endless frustration in aspiration Words upon words upon words Dreams upon dreams upon dreams Getting and going nowhere forever unheard The real poets find their anthologized place And we know them over and over and over again The rest of us just appear this only once If we appear at all And our words and our hearts and our minds Do not encompass and inspire the endless rereadings Time and Time’s Wounds make again and again and again We are once only always forever losts Nothing will save us These words too coming in the wake of a long night’s reading Of the poems of others Cannot sustain and redeem Cannot be what they would be Cannot help and cannot save Me or you or anyone we love Even as poetry. God Who Knows All And in the End Decides on Everything Has made us smaller even than the Angels And our place in the Divine Song Is not as far as we know Anywhere heard at all. Goodbye world We are going We have done what we could We have written and written and written Oxymandias’ poet will remain And we will not The lone and desert sands will stretch away When we are not even a single grain.