WE HATE POETS HERE

WE HATE POETS HERE

Love sans irony. It sticks on the craw sometimes
when you least expect the nuance of sincerity.

Have we learned then to obfuscate what we seek
to reveal like the primrose creating claw-like shadows?

We do live in a bleary quonset that is inhospitable
to the clear and transparent, we create our shadows.

There are Babel towers in every ramshackle cottage,
the dumb and the weary are with us to the bitter end.

When this masquerade is over, when the periphrastic
shackles of language are all shorn off our tongues,

we doff our hoods, tear off our masks, and speak
of the feelings we cloak with opaque figures, symbols

of bondage we promised to overcome, speak with the rare
and liquid tongues of angels who call washtubs basins

and flowers simply flowers for the living not the dead,
and like the honchos at the Bronx call a spade a shovel.

Perhaps, then, they would not remind us of how long
we really have languished in our exile from our dreams.

—Albert B. Casuga
06-15-11

Prompt: Listen, if we hate poets here, it’s only because/ they brandish empty wash tubs instead of roses/ & remind us we’re all in exile from our dreams.---From “Passage to Exile” by Dave Bonta, Via Negativa, 06-15-11, http://www.vianegativa.us/2011/06/