Didn’t Charles Baudelaire just nail it?
Don’t most poets sooner or later find
themselves king — or queen — of a rainy country?
Matthew Sweeney did. Linda Pastan did too.
What keeps our words rolling on dark days
like these? I think poets understand
we must meet the tyrant’s military
parade with a counter-parade of wild
images and brave sounds, must meet
the martinet’s anal order with delicious
disorder, and seed the clouds with granules
of freedom to rust the tanks in their treads,
put the howitzers out of their misery so all
may hear the soul’s lovely moan through the trees.
.
Thomas R. Smith
.