Have I Lost The 'Visionary Gleam? ' Poem by Shalom Freedman

HAVE I LOST ‘THE VISIONARY GLEAM?

Have I lost the ‘visionary gleam’?
Did I ever have it?
Is Death ‘luckier than we’ think
Or ‘lucky’ at all?
How supreme can a fiction be?
And whoever really has drunk ‘the milk’ of paradise?
Why should a rose be sick or dead?
And why should ‘patience to prevent that murmur reply’?
Who said ‘The glory of God is davka in dappled things?
And what kind of fool compares what he builds to what ‘birds build’?

Can a skeptic be a poet in a real way?
Can poetry be read by those who doubt the truth of its lines?
Wasn’t he who said beauty is truth and truth beauty dying and lying at the same time?
What does it mean to steal a line of someone else‘s great beauty
And turn it into one’s own petty gripe?

Poetry is better served by the real thing,
Than by pastiches and parodies
And skeptical borrowers
And fake rivals in anxiety of influence-

One can take from the vast book of the living dead
The most treasured lines
And betray them into irony and silliness-

Yet those lines out-top the little later commentators
And make me wonder why I exercise my mind
In vain exercises like this
Instead of trying to write the true poetry-

‘Life is real life is earnest and the grave is not the goal’
Here he lies where he longed to be, home is the sailor home from the sea and the hunter from the hill’
Master of my fate, captain of my soul?

Do not take the lines literally
Read them with love and understanding
When they say something meaningful and beautiful to you
Hold on to them.

A poem is a poem for a that
Even for the wee slick cowrin beasties.