In poetry lies a perennial question:

Does the poet inhabit the rooms of the poem?

One senses the deepest suggestion,

That the poet is indeed the persona in the poem.

With this poem I hope to answer,

The question that lies on every reader’s lips.

Who stalks the poem like a savage panther,

As the poet with his idea comes to grips?

Is the poet but a squatting beggar with his cup,

Reaching out to the world with a plea,

In search of a few responses his satisfaction to sup,

Without giving himself away to the powers that be?

I once wrote a poem about sorrow,

My readers imagined that I was shedding real tears.

While I had taken a long-lost love on borrow,

That I had forgotten about over the years.

No doubt, in my life sorrow has played its part,

But as I write, that doesn’t mean I am sad.

Sorrow conjures up a world broken apart,

I remember and write about even when glad.

I once wrote a poem called the agony of lust,

As if no one has felt its scourge but only me.

Why must the poet be writing about himself as a must,

Spread out there naked on the page for all to see.

After all, lust an experience that escapes no one,

Its driving force woven into our blood and veins.

The devil’s lust surges within as a ripened plum,

To leave people spent and exhausted in its remains.

When it comes to nature poems, these are mine,

Every shooting star, crescent moon, butterfly.

They lie there in the heart ready to chime,

Casting their inner glow like a nighttime firefly.

Some poems are indeed reflective of the inner self,

When not afraid to be honest about who I am.

I simply scribble down the verses like an over-eager elf,

Happy to expose the workings of the inner man.

Poems of what I have lost, poems of what I have missed,

Events of the past that still linger.

Poems about dawn’s awakening and when I was first kissed,

The smoke of my father’s cigar, the touch of my mother’s finger.

All right, I give up the ghost, set myself free, surrender,

The poems I have written are there for all to see.

They fill an ancient parchment of all I remember,

And lie there innocently on the page remembering me.

Poems of happiness and sadness, hope and despair,

Feelings of loss and destitution beyond repair.

Poems that fill the void of silence with their inner glow,

Poems that have passed through me of all we will ever know.

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(c) John Herlihy 7 December 2018