The Speech That All Pilgrims Should Listen To

Poetry is the highest form of art

Calling for refined intuition

The finesse to peer into the Earth’s soul

To ‘laugh’ at her foibles

Poetry is a Laboratory

That the word scientists

Retreat to examine human actions

To ‘satirise’ the affairs of mankind

Poetry is a thankless service

That creative souls pain for

To explain phenomena

To think in the realm of the gods

Life is not any different.

Every second a child is born

A poetic title is written

Scribbled in its cry, emblazoned

On palms of loving hands,

Pilgrim, did you know that that cry

Is dramatic, has pauses, has musicality

Even amidst its irritation and monotony?

Seconds are letters, stanzas years, refrains

Repeated successes and failures, rhyme discipline

Of thoughts and actions, epic a long life, an epigramme

A short, witty life, a sonnet a romantic one—

Poetry is life, pilgrim, make no mistake about it

Poetry is not hidden in big tomes anymore

Not even in poetry collections

The bureaucratic tapes were burnt

And ‘people’ had their way

Now, they own it in their lips

Daily, poets speak to one another

Transmitting wonderful stanzas

We don’t have their names written

Save for the moist in their lips and fire in their eyes

Life can be difficult, like poetry,

In the crucible, we pound experiences

Into terse statements

Many can say a lot, few can say less

Pilgrim, one day I will write my autobiography

In one stanza, capture my sojourn here,

Life is like that—like a poem—

Laughter could jump from a page, sadness linger

Satire smirk, optimism overarch

There is so much happiness as there is so much sadness

There is so much contentment as there is so much unfulfilment

Predator and prey exist in the same jungle

The adrenalin keep both at the edge—

the hunter and the hunted—

the lion and the gazelle are

the characters in the script of life’s drama

their tricks and intrigue is the plot

the end breaks my heart

but the excitement precedes that

This life, pilgrim, is a mystery

I am always shrouded in her befuddlement

On the walls of my house, I have pinned thoughts

Most uncompleted, because thoughts are scared easily

By the frame of time,

This is the Essence of Life, pilgrim,

To discover and explain these realities

The excitement for the process is called Life.

For a prompt of Carry On Tuesday #148, Saturday 10^th March

Task: To write a poem inspired by the title and first line of Merle Haggard’s country song, "Life’s like poetry".