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 10th March
Task: To write a poem inspired by the title and first line of Merle Haggard’s country song, "Life’s like poetry".
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