Verse Is Free

– Given it thought and conclude
there is no way to critically acclaim
poets. Whether this is from voices

of children singing easy rhythms
of childhood’s rhymes free of peer
pressure in the mind’s playground

or the professorial view, effulgent
in its own, dry, dusty, academicals’
estrangedness, or listening to light,

blasé commentary of wanna-be poets
one-upping one another – reaching for
the same blissful state of acceptance.

To me it is either idyllic in ignorance
or obscure belief – perhaps blatantly
channelled by spirits of dead poets?

To such dramatic company each piece
read or quoted reveals not who
one is but who one wants to be.

Perhaps this is the truth. Poems are
orifices from which poets birth, but
there is no paternity, verse is free.
© 30 January 2008, I. D. Carswell