A POEM FOR LILY
A LITTLE PREAMBLE
Like most poets, I want each of my poems to stand on its own, a bridge between me and my reader. Each should have its own strength, its own integrity, and be whole enough to offer an experience for the reader free of intrusion or interpretation on my part. Such intrusions would merely make me a critic of my own stuff, which is pretentious and—worst of all—boring.
Having said all that, here I am breaking my own rule, but this is a rather special situation. A fellow Hubber and fellow poet, Lilyfly, was recently going through what our British friends might call a “rough patch”. Lilyfly is a poet of great strength and honesty, but she was down on her poetry and generally wrestling with a lot of negative demons and this kind of energy was strongly present in a couple of poems. I sent the following short poem to her privately, as a gesture of respect for her talent and a bit of an attempt to pull her out of the doldrums.
She asked me to make the poem available publicly—so that’s the story behind it, and here it is.
A POEM FOR LILY
when you've written songs
for angels,
brushed your hair gently
against the outer reaches of the stars,
and polished dew drops to
diamond-facet brilliance,
it can be difficult to
remember that those
breakthrough moments are
the slashing swords,
the whirring maces,
the marching phalanxes
of war
that sweeten the sewers
drain the fetid cesspools
and cast sweet seeds
on the dying fields of indifference.
© clark cook
