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Poet Tree

Poems are renderings of the soul’s spirit,
The highest power of language and wit.
The reader then translates back to spirit
If the soul responds, then a poem you’ve writ!

A poem provides universal advice;
It’s structured, intense, rhythmical, concise—
A unified body of sensation,
Thoughts, and passions. You’ll want to read it twice!

A poem is both the thought and the presence,
An object born from one’s profoundest sense,
An image of diction, feeling, and rhythm—
It’s both the existence and the essence.

A poem is a truth fleshed in living words
That, showing unapprehended proof,
Lift the veil to reveal hidden beauty:
It’s life’s image drawn in eternal truth.

Poetry makes immortal what is best
In life: it frees images of dreams impressed,
Apprehends the vanishing phantasms,
And sends them forth in fine words, fully dressed.

Poetry makes clear what is barely heard,
When it translates soul-language into words,
Whereas, melody plays straight on the heart.
Merged, they create song—heart and soul converge.

Words echo the soul’s vocabulary,
Being just a shadow of what’s primary;
But, once ideas have been fully grasped,
Mere words are no longer necessary.

Poetry lives silently in an illustration.
The beauty of a poem is painting with diction.
These, like music, are mere works of worldly art
They’re just shadows of ultimate perfection!

Poets love nature, thought, art, and beauty.
Keats enchants the senses with imagery.
Shelley unveils the spirit’s mystery.
Byron lays open the earth’s majesty.

I ran breathless through meadow and forest,
Fast pursued by the stings of wind and rain;
On and on I wandered, wild without rest,
Searching for a haven from life’s dull pain.

The storm chased me till I could go no more;
I stood helpless, backed up against a door.
I fell through it before death could touch me,
My fall cushioned by the dreams supporting me.

I found a garden half as old as time,
In which poets could write and live their rhyme
While the nightingale created the rose,
By moonlight magic from the thoughts sublime.

The scene unfolded before me, such as
Music often approaches and surrounds,
And builds on the vibrance which in one is,
To fill all that lives with beautiful sounds.

I brushed aside the webs of gossamer,
As came to life all that I remember:
My quick thoughts fell, condensing into dew,
As living dreams unveiled all that I knew.

I wandered down memory’s path,
Aglow in the soft beauty that it hath.
I saw Johnny Keats kissing Fanny Brawne,
As he spoke more than words but less than song.

And Byron, endowing form with fancy,
While Wordsworth penned his thoughts to Lucy,
And Shelley, plumbing the depths of mystery.
I read them all; now they’re a part of me.

Deeper still I probed, looking in on it,
And heard Mrs. Browning reading a sonnet.
Poetically I took them all in, even
The shadowy Emily Dickenson.

So there I rested, up against a tree,
Savoring the feeling of their poetry,
Where all the flowers used in Shakespeare’s plays
Grew together in a living bouquet.

And there beneath the rose tree, Old Khayyam
Wrote his verse, looking younger than I am;
He lived the proof of his philosophy,
The writing of which was only secondary.

My quick thoughts rose, mist rising from the dew,
While living dreams unveiled more than I knew.
From poetry’s light a garden grew,
Revealing mysterious wonders new.

All this I remember, and much more,
But I don’t write as much as before,
For living and feeling come first in life,
And now I’ve a garden I can’t ignore.