11 February 2024

By Philip Kuepper

Longfellow writes of Milton’s verse
that its cadence reads like the rolling of the sea.
And I think the sea a paradise lost,
and regained, at each breaking
and reforming of the waves;
and the surge and retreat of politics,
the poet knew when the Puritan tide rose
against the Royal shore.
Even the vessel of the soul is not stormproof.
And when the chop becomes so rough
that heads are lost, souls founder
on the rocks of extremism.
Oars splinter. The ship breaks up.
And rowers are left to tread a treacherous sea.
It is safer to row the sea of verse,
than the one of politics,
or of paradise, for that matter.
A cabal of poets, separate,
each in their own study,
allows room enough to breathe,
unlike the smoke-filled backroom,
where all are gathered close and talking at once,
not like a cadenced sea,
but a roiling, howling one.
And paradise is put on hold.

(5 January 2024)