Recycle

Use these words in a poem …white boy …badger …caulking gun …crow-pecked …extra belt holes

Crow-pecked words return to litter,
ignored by probing badgers.
An old caulking gun rusts
with broken hyphens.
Empty bags rustle
discarded titles.
Dinner’s excess stains
crumpled edits.
The old white boy with extra belt holes,
scavenges for metaphors.

Hand Written

arrows, cross outs, inserts –
the natural text of my frantic
fingers and blocked stops.
Poems resist my keyboard. Orderly
black words on white pages miss
the love making of
passion
and subtraction,
contractions
of word-birth,
struggles
of a poem
to breathe.
Careful fonts, even spacing, perfectly
straight lines make glossy stills, but
hide the messy mouthing
of poems emerging
like well-chewed dog toys.
Poems are never finished. Typed and clean,
they are merely dressed for church
after shameless Saturday nights.

Ode to the Poet

By Dick Rafoth

He sits in the quiet of the morning
On the porch, dew dripping – his place.
The northerly has died.
The fog has taken its place – three poles, then nothingness,
Waiting for the words,
A few thoughts, random.
A line begins to form.
It will come – on its own terms.
Now the fourth pole appears, the osprey calls,
The day is awakening.
Time to get the paper.

Choices

For years, I wove a tapestry
Of data and technology,
A network threaded carefully
With software, sales and smart VCs.

The days began before the sun
And daily meetings had begun.
Though early hours were always shunned,
The dev team made the software run.

We pushed the edge of innovation,
Weaving luck, imagination
Into clever applications
And successful operations.

But … there was a time, important to me,
When oration, words and poetry
Were loved for what they just could be
Before we parsed them digitally.

One day when I was just eighteen,
I had to make a choice between
The seductive, sexy info scene
And what had been my poet’s dream.

I said good-bye to Whitman, Yeats
And Frost and other wordy greats.
Instead, I joined with Jobs and Gates
To seek some more pragmatic mates.

It’s turned out well – great things occurred.
But now it’s time for what’s deferred,
To give a voice to phrase and word
And let the sounds of soul be heard.

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.