The Best Poet

You bless us

With rich soil, rain to dampen it, sun to warm it,

Worms to prepare it,

And seeds to purpose it.

You bless us

With Saturday mornings

And summer cool,

Before the climbing heat of

Late-en-ing day

Warms beyond warm.

Luscious morn,

Lustrous day,

Golden leaves

Sunlit behind

Showers precious life

All around.

The best poet is the one who touches you best. The worst poet is someone who touches you not. That means, of course, that poets get better as we grow in our own sensibilities, in our ability to make sense of challenging means of expression, and as life experience provides the loam to plant and the loom to put together ideas, emotions, and enduring, yet malleable, perspective.

The best poet is the one who touches you best. Who touches your heart. Who taps into your soul. Who sneaks into your mind. Who reels, or steals, your emotions and your thoughts and exposes them…to you. Who touches, taps, reels you. Breaks into you. Exposes you. Realigns you.

Who shakes you up or shakes you down. Who remixes the mix of all of you of all of everything.

The worst poet does none of that. For you. For others the worst poet is the best poet. But not for you.

I like poets who talk about love and flowers and clouds and courage and strife. Just life. In elegant ways that don’t make me feel dumb, but that do stretch my imagination and my hopes and touch, tap, and reel me. Who remind me of what it is to be human. To be alive. To care. To wish. To smell. To be amazed.

The best poet is the one who touches you best.

You bless me with time

To watch the morning wake up.

Halcyon hours,

With just a scintilla of expectation

About what is planned for the day,

And what is not.

You bless me with time

To just be.

You are the best poet,

You bless me with your words

About soil

And worms

And seeds

And late-en-ing days

And leaves

And expectation

And loss.

That’s an important role

You play too.

You remind me of the many ways

I'm blessed.

You bless those you touch,

The ways you tap, break, expose,

Reel our feelings and our thoughts about ourselves,

And life, and death.

You are the best poet,

You who touch my soul

With your words.