after Billy Collins
Hold this poem to your ear,
And you’ll hear the sea.
But that’s not all.
I’ve put silences between the stanzas,
Just for you,
For when you need them.
Go ahead. Try them.
Nice, huh?
And here’s the best part:
You can come back to them
Anytime you want.
It occurs to me, writing this,
That I’ve yet to give you
Much to look at, Princesa,
Like trilobites and Groucho glasses,
Orchids, geishas, Peruvian pots,
Smoke signals, pagodas,
That I’ve totally forgotten to include
A plump yellow banana slug
The size of a mouse
On the mailbox,
In the rain,
At dawn.
But I have included in this next line
A plate of mango rice
And here: coffee from Colombia
Sweetened with coconut cream
And dulce de leche.
Too much? You might think so,
But taste it.
Because I’ve built it into a poem,
This cup will be like those
You’ve read about in myths and fables:
The most heroic of heavy drinking
Will not empty it.
I have this on the authority
Of Keats himself.
How cool is that?
It’s like love.
The more you give of it,
The more you have.
Art: Young woman, strolling, Lalibela, Ethiopia. Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D
Copyright 2019. Robert D. Shepherd. All rights reserved.
For more poems by Bob Shepherd (for for essays on the reading and writing of poetry), go here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/category/poetry/
Bob Shepherd | Praxis 