Today’s post is a narrative poem…a short story that examines why we write.
Poems and people like all things, are temporary, fleeting moments of brilliance. Like cinders, brightly rising from a blazing fire, only to descend, helplessly, to the ground and combine with the dust. With everything and nothing.
I hope you like it.
jefe

Castaway Poet

A poet on a cruise one day
was shipwrecked; left a castaway
On desert isle he found himself
Bereft of food and friends and wealth
The days and weeks and months went by
No one could hear his anguished cry
Survival step by step he learned
But poetry alas, was spurned
No paper, pen nor simple crayon
Nor coconut to scratch upon
The rhyming words filled up his head
He might as well be gone and dead
And then it came; A Lightning Bolt!
That gave his mind a mighty jolt
His finger dragged through low tide sand
Could let his poems live on the land
So every waning tide’s arrival
Helped the castaway’s survival
After just a day or two
The poet found and then he knew
That every tide that rose each day
Would wash his rhyming words away
He knew his memory would fail
So he could not retell his tales
And in his head two voices sparred
About the way the ocean marred
The work he wrote that could not stay
Words gone tomorrow here today
One voice said “Stop;
it’s just no use!”
The other said;
“Go; let it loose.”
Then as the evening turned to night
Bathed by the full moon’s granite light
He said aloud the way it goes
Unheard for others to suppose
“A poem or person, has its time,
of birth and life and death and rhyme.”
“And all the world, and all that’s in it,
live and die, in one short minute.”
A month of poems passed by and then
Another came and went again
So many words washed out to sea
As years went on he set them free
He asked, “Why do I write a phrase?”
Remembering his younger days
“I wrote for love and to impress,
to satisfy myself I guess,
for sustenance, I wrote for me,
to stave away insanity.”
That was fine when he was young
To rhyme words to,
be said and sung
But as the sea consumed his
rhyme
And hid from eyes throughout all time
So it was never meant
that he
Achieve his immortality
One morning he awoke and wrote
His friend the sea a final note
“Both me and thee lived side by side.”
“You scattered me the whole world wide.”
“My words you drink, as your tides swell.”
“I gave to you, my tales to tell.”
“In whispers ‘neath, your crashing surf,
on beaches all across the earth.”
“So here I walk into the sea.”
“You have my poems…
And now it’s time…
you take…
the rest of me.”
Jeff Burkhart’s “Rhyme and Reason”
© Copyright, April, 2017
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