The Poetry we Brought With Us
I’ve found evidence of life
In poems, the dash of dictionary
Spirit’s metamorphosis
Ink stains on my smile
What gets lost in translation
Is a lot, the silence and the person
The Imaginary gardens
The collected experiences of the individual
We were poets even in prose
Even on our break, in steadfast definition
Of being possessed by beauty
Of being distorted by gratitude
Our identities were vital truths
To history, that’s how intimately
We related to words, we made rhetoric
Out of the quarrel with ourselves
We founded our own kind of poetry
It was, the liberation of the senses
Divinity’s distinction of image and soul
It was a Plato tattoo on the back of our hand
Always ready, immediately syllabled
We kept invisible keepsakes of our tribe
Like misprint of reincarnations forgotten
We felt the summer skies in books
And heaven’s lies in paragraphs
We became prophets of philosophy kidnapped
And activists against ugliness
The secret suffering was ours
We found beautiful music even in
The most tormented of societies
And we envisioned the future
Wed to the joys of the past
I’ve found evidence of life in nature
And an unknown author
With appropriate ghosts
Exploring my own amazement
I felt the symmetry of poetry
As precise as astronomy
Portraits of revelation lost
In Haikus to the infinite
Maybe we all carry the soul
Of a poet who died young inside of us.
