0124 A Dead Poet Comments On 'Comments' Poem by Michael Shepherd

Erstwhiles,
of candle-laboured hours and screwed-up eyes,
the quill scratch-scratching, the paper ragged rough, the ink
unwieldy, black and unredeeming
as a judge’s cap –

fame – or barely fame,
the least to be hoped for, a mere ‘name’ – a
mere sheet of scrawled, curled paper
passed around a smoky coffee-house: they
so shrewd of eye and savage oft of wit;

or at the best, the whim of jobbing printer:
then, fame or forgetting lay beyond this life.

The grave’s a humbling, private place
where even poets labelled ‘metaphysical’
begin their education quite anew…

and yet, and yet - some centuries ahead,
some divine post-classic irony may devise
a means of universal access
to poems quite unread
(alas, and oft unread their readers too…)

and so, humbled by cold grave and death,
there’s one more humbling yet to bear:
the stripling’s comments on a verse that lives,
the poet – would he know it – dead:
‘Not so great – keep writing’…

raising in these bleachwhite bones and grimjaw skull
the faintest meta-physical, unseen
ghost of a smile