Writing a Poem

I wish that I could write a poem

Like the one by Robert Frost

Maybe about great uncle Owen

And the soldiers killed by machine gun mowing

A generation lost

 

Or a poem about those vivid faces

So well described by Yeats

Those people of motley and their graces

Now forgotten though some left traces

And all their cruel fates

 

Or his poem about a girl so fair

Who when old and full of sleep

Might read a book just lying there

And see again how deep his care

A love that made him weep

 

Or that funny poem by our friend Larkin

With that profanity to begin

About your parents and their marking

Affecting you with all their barking

And how it is a sin

 

These are simple powerful poems

With rhyme and deep felt feeling

From writers with a way of knowing

How words can set ideas a-flowing

And deep felt truths revealing

 

Brian Fahy

7 January 2022

 

+ I often re-read The Path Not Taken by Robert Frost, Easter 1916 and When You Are Old by W B Yeats, and This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin.