The Gardener's Curse Poem by William F Dougherty

Straining to fulfill Adam's primal curse,
like liberating marble with his hands,
he polishes signs and sounds to rehearse
ranks of winking words the verse demands,
dispensing prosody within his lines
to celebrate along a duple beat
meet metaphor that blooms within designs,
takes hairpin turns, then halts, breathlessly neat.

Poems are never final, just abandoned:
brashly arranged, and grudgingly stranded;
a masterstroke or a plodding affair,
inheritors of Adam's naming chore,
a hard privilege then and evermore.