I am good at being irked by the world
to such an extent that
I have written about my irked-ness
in more than a few poems.
‘Look,’ people will one day say,
when they’ve finally got round
to discovering my poetic output,
‘there goes Fergus the so-called poet,
transforming the petty wretchedness of the world
into his little wordy works of art,
one minor irritation at a time!’
And, being me, I would take this as an opportunity
to be irked at their presumption
that I was writing about some irky thing or other.
For there is only so much irk poetry
which one may tolerably create
before a poem about flowers, or trees,
or the movement of clouds in the sky
makes its unwritten presence felt,
as it struggles to emerge from the nowhere of ideas.
Here comes a flock of birds, painted black
on the canvas of today’s blue-grey sky,
heading for the familiar horizon of the Malvern Hills,
a line of poetry more poetic than any I will ever write.
No comments:
Post a Comment