Great Poets Missed Never Met Poem by Terence George Craddock (Spectral Images and Images Of Light)

Great Poets Missed Never Met

Rating: 5.0


Great poets missed
never met
never engaged
artistic in conversation

we missed William Shakespeare
John Milton, Edmund Spenser
who wrote 'The Faerie Queene';
John Done long gone but not forgotten

we missed Francois Marie Arouet
better known as pen name Voltaire
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
and macabre master Edgar Allan Poe

we missed the romantic poets
Shelley, Keats, Lord Byron
all dead within three years
of each others tragic deaths

we missed William Blake
“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,
In the forest of the night,
What immortal hand or eye”

we missed the lake poets
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
William Wordsworth who
quarrelled irrevocably parted

we missed Robert Browning
wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Henry Wadsworth-Longfellow
Italian Dante Gabriel Rossetti

sister Christina Georgina Rossetti
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman
Lewis Carroll who took us in concepts
‘Through the Looking-Glass’ allusions

we also missed Wilfred Owen pacifist
T.S. Eliot walking ‘The Waste Land’
Siegfried Sassoon slaughter survived
Wystan Hugh Auden a man of a lit wit

William Carlos Williams upon ‘a red
wheel barrow’ so much depends spins
Sylvia Plath into ‘The Bell Jar’ while
Allen Ginsberg stalks Walt Whitman

through ‘A Supermarket in California’
as he asks ‘Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are You my Angel? ’
‘We strode down the open corridors in

our solitary fancy tasting artichokes,
possessing every frozen delicacy, and
never passing the cashier. Where are
we going, ’ Terence Craddock they asked

me, but already I have passed on into
future flights of fancy, as I blaze past
Space Shuttle Challenger 73 seconds
into its flight; before NASA knew it needed

another seven astronauts, as silver molten
teardrops fall gravity defeated earth bound
while I stealth fly Iraqi skies dropping golden
phoenix liquid fire searching out peace signs.

Great poets missed
never met
never engaged
artistic in conversation

you missed William Shakespeare
you missed Edgar Allan Poe
you missed Allen Ginsberg
don’t miss Terence Craddock

smile on the face of the Tyger
disappears entirely leaving only
wide grin suspended in air memory
leaves stir whisper passing words

Camera Obscura vaulted dark room
collecting plate of poems bright sunlight
travelling through pinhole wickerwork
interlaced fingers creates circular patches

light cast upon the ground captures images
inner eye views Pyramidal rays thought
forms while Charon poles our poet friends
past black waters of death to alight in dreams.


Copyright © Terence George Craddock
Allen Ginsberg quotations are from his poem ‘A Supermarket in California’.

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