Can We Agree on What a Poem Is?

What makes a poem, I’d like to know,
When poems can dress in rhyme and meter
Or flaunt a naked formlessness?

So,
Is a poem …
A perfectly rounded single thought,
An image elegantly drawn,
An emotion coaxed from hiding?

Does e is mc2 make Einstein a poet?
Are Rembrandt oils epic poems,
And Verdi operas elegies?

Words! Can we agree that poems must
Think and paint, evoke with words?

Shakespeare’s sonnets,
Nash’s ditties,
Eliot’s erudite musings,
Carroll’s nonsense,
Cummings cantos,
Silly Seuss delights.

Different, oh so different, but
Poems – each word poems – yes?

So why not verses:
“Good Night Moon,”
“Lolita,” and
“The Gettysburg Address?”

Or will we, like Justice Stewart, judge,
“I’ll know it when I see it,”
And in the end, find poetry’s just
The good twin of obscenity?

For now, I’ll read my Whitman, Yeats,
And newer poets who sing to me,
And give my poems voice like theirs
Until my verses sing for me.