The Stillborn Poet Or What Never Was... Poem by John Tansey

What would if suffer;

One more poet, more or less,
one more poem written, never read,
spoken, but never heard.

Whose daily existence would be affected?
by the persistence of one
to presume his own words, be heard as scripture,

And what it be for?

The temporal vanity of one;
That we can be something other
than what our parents always said
we would amount to?

What if a prolific, prophet or poet,
nearing the end of his life,
and having preserved, every word
on paper, deed or our lost oral lineage,
decided, to destroy it all....

Just to be an anonymous man in an ordinary grave,
whoses spirit, like a big wind
loosed upon the world, to be inhaled by others;
when he becomes a mound of mindless ash.

How do we know that it has not
already happened, that the world
is less due to someone's anonymity?

Or, that God intervened and prevented
some birth altogether, Saying,
'After my son, Jesus, you will not have at another! '


Copyright ©2007 John Thomas Tansey