Poetry where are you?
Poetry today now you have to listen
Without you all I do is yammer
I'm stuck Nature's fool
A duck walked by Now a pheasant
Outside the window is cocking his head
The gorse is bright yellow
Rosehips are red the sky blue
Poetry it isn't fair that you left me
Surrounded by so much beauty
That draws me out of myself
But I don't need beauty I need you
I walked yesterday and couldn't find you
I was picking blackberries from the trail
Reaching way in for the ripe ones
I almost fell into the tangle of briars
You were the berry I couldn't reach
I came to a family on the trail
They were just heading out
When I was hurrying home
Because the sky was darkening
And the wind was moving
In the tops of the trees
The color of the ocean had changed
From deep blue to gray
And all I could think of was Don't breathe
When you walk past that sneezing girl
You were in the spirit of that family
That reified my fear
And then I passed the rusty hulk
Of the shipwreck at Lobster Cove
The DT Sheridan A tug
That was blown against the rocks in 1948
When it was towing two barges
The captain ordered his crew to abandon ship
And they cut the barges loose
Only the metal hull remains
The first time we visited Monhegan
I marveled at the scale and mass of its carcass
Since then I have avoided it
Even with my eyes because it felt unlucky
Like staring at an unburied corpse
And to me poor poet
Cursed with metaphoric vision
It evokes the hubris
Of the human race
Poetry you would have warned me
Not to write about this wreck
Which drags me down
Hollowed and abandoned
In my shipwrecked humanness
Poetry where are you?
