Poetic Faith

Perhaps poets patch and bandy

Words in a brow-beaten

Style of theologically penned

Liturgies, for us to entwine

In a quagmire of Grundy*

Quibbling, yet misapprehend

Shreds of truth in-between the line.

Perhaps poets rouse auguries

Of words like a poet aborted

Pounded to pulp by lexicographicide*

Or as a stillbirth crushed, mislaid

In wombs of pregnant allegories

And blind metaphoric passages

From whence voices safely hide

Silenced by shrouding images.

Perhaps poets tether and knot

Words with rhymes caught

Amidst a periphrastic elucidation

And a worn-out poetical fashion

With wits tusked in a still tussle

That struggle intolerably from a wrestle

Against syntax and style snares

To untie redolent literary flairs.

Perhaps a poet apes, shapes, mimics

Mirrors reality, creating a doubt

To Thomas* and his sceptics,

That parables are an all—

Sophisticated scheme, so subtle

Of saying something simple,

Yet words are mirages that blackout,

Envelope and obscure semantics.

On the surface, an intelligible untruth;

Underneath, the unintelligible truth

An etymological eclipse of polemics.

Silence!

Suppose poets impose

A short-term curfew with

A disbelief that might expose

Pedestrian loyalty—and

In a twinkle of an eye, suspend

Poetic faith…

Aha!

To master language is a poets’ dream

To use words, to concoct sentences

To search for formulation, revise a theme;

The risk in every creative endeavour

To manipulate rules of language,

To mould primordial muses

Upsets a semantic structure.

In the end words lack precision,

And meanings almost vague,

Or content lost to deconstruction*

Since poets can never outsmart

Words for what they no longer

Have to say, or in a manner

In which they are neither

Disposed nor inclined to assert.

©roundsquare.

*Mrs.Grundy – a notorious grandma venerated for prudery James’ ‘Speed the Plough’ play.

*Lexicographicide – The scientific formula of killing words, literary. A coinage popularised by Taban Lo Liyong’s ‘Popular East African Orature’.

*Thomas – also Doubting Thomas, a Biblical personification of someone who doubts even in the face of proof.

*Deconstruction – A theory in literature that fifty readers will give the same text more than one interpretation. That work is open to many meaning, theme, etc.