“We love because it’s the only true adventure.”
    – Nikki Giovanni

So often they are bad news bards°
saying things like believe him
when he shows you who he is*
and the gods punish us best
by answering our prayers.**

Time is a fowl above all the brilliance
laying on the lawn; and time and splendor
cares not a whit for us,*** leaving in their wake
our once-in-a-lifetime, misspent youth,****
umpteen dreams deferred and might have beens,
loudly tolling bells for everyone carrying their multitudes.††

A ballad is a song is a poem is a song†††
and we sang with a song that was more than song.††††

But then they also gave us negative capabilityβ
and antiphrasis: poetry making everything happen,ββ
truth and beauty,β hope on feathers,βββ infinity
in a grain of sandββββ and a new year full of things
that are yet to be…advisories to fight all the dying,¶¶
to just do it¶¶¶ and specific instructions
on the best way forth, energy to run on,
to heed, to heart, to annotate, to consider:

I am breathing;※※ walk softly across my dreams.※※※

 

 

* Maya Angelou ** Oscar Wilde *** Virgil, William Wordsworth and Geoffrey Chaucer **** Henry Wadsworth Longfellow  † Langston Hughes and John Greenleaf Whittier †† John Donne and Walt Whitman ††† Gertrude Stein already alluding to William Shakespeare †††† Edgar Allan Poe β John Keats β β W. H. Auden β β β Emily Dickinson  β β β β William Blake ¶ Rainer Maria Rilke ¶¶ Dylan Thomas ¶¶¶ Horace via Nike™ ※ Robert Frost ※※ Sylvia Plath ※※※ William Butler Yeats

From The Writer’s Guide to Common Grammar