On poetry

Making our marks on paper or snow

we travel, gambling with eternity.

We make a contract with the enemy

in the moving illusion of now.

We leave our tracks, our footstep trail.

We will die trying. It seems a pity

in our statement, our poetry

that, ultimately, we always fail.

We move on, we travel hopefully

towards a vanishing infinity.

We record our visions with rhyme

in black on white, a sacred polarity.

We conduct an argument with mortality.

We try again. The enemy is time

I really like Glyn Maxwell s book, which I’m reading, which inspired this poem. I particularly like his take on the relationship between opposites and what he says about poetry and time. The book tackles the subject obliquely, poetically in fact. It's not at all what you would expect. From Amazon: ‘On Poetry is a collection of short essays and reflections on poetry from the poet Glyn Maxwell. These essays illustrates Maxwell's poetic philosophy, that thegreatest verse arises from a harmony of mind and body, and that poetic formsoriginate in human necessities breath, heartbeat, footstep, posture. He speaksof his inspirations, his models, and takes us inside the strange world of theCreative Writing Class.’