Red ball (for better quality you should should read it aloud)


And if I said a ball is red,
and all I said was that,

and if you thought,
a ball is round, and on its surface
texture found, and on your finger
round and round it spins,
then off the glass rebounds
to take another shot;

and if you thought,
a ball is red, the colour blazing in my head
of ripe cranberries in a bog, or colour
of a short-hair dog that's trained
to hunt a hog,

I could not say
you understood, for in my mind
the ball was wood, and sitting on a metal shelf,
a toy made by Santa's elf–
its red the plastic kind.

One-hundred and seventy-one thousand,
four-hundred and seventy-six,
the words within our bag of tricks
to try and say what we must say,
and still not be cliché.

It's why I write to please myself,
and maybe with a metaphor,
or simile, hyperbole, or maybe
if personified, it touches deep inside
and amplifies, when it is read,
a human watershed.