Poets are not pale
and delicate dreamers lost in lilac twilight.
They’re not cloaked sleepwalkers
with a disordered persona
or losers stuck in circular loops,
nor are they certifiably frenzied finches
or grim grannies
with grumpy bums.
That’s not what poets are.
A poet
is not a satyr in striped tweed,
not a canary reincarnated as cured sausage;
not a tattered target,
a fractured fighter jet,
or some pitiful portrait
of a snarling stray
in shredded shorts,
its snout sullied and smeared.
That’s not what poets are.
A poet’s pact with this world
is to circulate the stale air
inside the stifling stables
of your criminal bigotry,
and remind you that a poet
is not a puffed-up prophet,
a brash brute
a smug sage,
or a clanky tram
that sputters out of power
before the crack of dawn.
That’s not what poets are.
They’re born in
the subdued sparkle and sheen
of the fruity and fragrant garden of the Gods,
with linguistic tics
and the prickly privilege
to pierce their listeners
with torrents of truths,
rumbling ruthless retorts,
and uncanny discoveries—like
saying the flowers flung around graves,
rather than mere wilted wreaths,
are indeed arms, reaching out.
They shake off the shackles
of shabby dogmas and canons.
They’re free of fears and fables,
of rusty reels of worn images,
of rancid credos,
and of nauseous notions.
That’s not what poets are.
Who knows what poets are then?
Perhaps nothing we’ve said
is true,
and poets are precisely what we’ve claimed they’re not.
Or just the opposite.
But one thing is for sure:
they’re blueberry bolts of lightning,
a thunder that rolls all their lives long
in the orchards of Eden.
Thunder targeting others and also themselves.
In roaring rumbles of thunder
and fierce cursed flashes,
lost in such lush delights,
they burst with a fragrant crackle—
like blueberry bolts of lightning.
That’s not
what poets
are.
2004
(A poem by Stoil Roshkev in my translation)
