Ars Poetica



And when we were but children of our own paradise,         

Did we not hear such lovely sounds as pierce the night      

When we waked to see the stars and tasted dewdrops        

That grant innocence to leaves and murder the night?         



And when we were but children tired in our youth,                      

Did we not close our weary lids to such soft threnodies              

That were sung at the funerals of wakefulness                             

Which is reborn to kill sleep and its silent melodies?                        



And we are but children who, not missing the innocence,      

Must make our fingers dance as we spill liquid sense,              

And search with twice twofold eyes tucked deep in our skulls      

To make sense flow, we look in and out of those hyaline hulls.      



Ring out celebration, have we not grown?                                  

Still young, hardly begun, we harbour that very innocence       

That within the slightest fledglings are sown,                               

And that we did reap when we took flight into experience.          



And then we did not know, did we, this game called creation?           

In which we dance with ancient gods and with their children,            

As we hunt through inward streams and lakes for inspiration.             

Those innocent, eternal seasons, we knew this not then!                      



And did we not yearn in our youngest reveries                

That there was a game that we had yet not played?           

But of all our revelations and our discoveries,                   

This one has not been at the slightest delayed!                  



Tell me, O tell me, that Orpheus as a child,                 

Did he not wish to put to rhyme and song                         

All the beauties and glories of the wild?                     

And though in childhood we oft times are wrong-      

Isn’t innocence of words but experience compiled?          



And if I was questioned what I have believed,

I would say that all are born poets in the womb,

And those from whom life has now been relieved,

And before they have composed they are in the tomb,

In death’s endless leisure, their powers will bloom,

And poets they shall be in their innocent doom.