To Serve And Protect

I'm not a seasoned poet

As standards go

I have neither the will nor wit

To assemble words that exhale

Sensuous truths of beauty

I have been tossed in poetry's net

To serve and protect its fate

I'm not sharp enough

To detect Moon's climb

For I'm not Archibald MacLeish

I'm no master metaphorician

To equate yellow fog to a cat

For I'm not T.S. Eliot

I'm just here to release the waves

That load my pen to barrage

Their organic ammunition

I cannot delve into the dark show

As smooth as Edgar Allen Poe

I'm not one to sing of love, of wine

For I'm no Rumi nor Khayyam

I can't settle music's dust

For I'm not Robert Frost

I can only write what I'm taught

By the shadow rulers of Art

If Yeats is awake

And Shakespeare watching

If Whitman, Dickinson, Keats

And the rest of the sublime ones

Happen to be espying

They would regard me

As an underling

And that would be a win

For I shall never reach

Their poetic spin.

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