POETRY PRIMER

“I wandered lonely as a cloud…”
Hmmm…one squirms a bit,
though perhaps kosher for its time.
And that “crowd”
(line three), while we’re still at it
makes for rather awkward rhyme.

The oded nightingale and autumn
fare slightly better, though not
much. “My heart aches, and a drowsy…”
Well, so does ours: they’re tiresome,
laboured, overwrought.
One stops short of lousy.

The romantic died hard in fact.
Shelley unbeknownst, leapt
an age when he met
his traveller from that antique tract:
cool, Olympian, adept,
as spare as you could get.

Still, far removed from sweeping
winds, the sear of green to brown,
and arid acres that would kill
or mute the song of hearts leaping –
lovers woken up to drown,
and the distant lilac-breeding April.

***