When you don’t hear its prayer. (Poems do
pray, stuffed away on shelves, their words
grow old, hardly heard, less alive than AI.)

Still, they pray in your mind as you travel
some Robert Frost pike, a college town
ahead. Frowning, you wish you could stay.

A poem dies when its dusty music is muffled,
its ink weakly coursing through consonants,
words flying a final time — scattering, hiding

in crags of oaks and elms. At last, they lay
ready to die, but for the poet out for a walk,
his hound dog moping along sniffing the bark.

He flushes the words from their holes, so they
take to the sky once more. Warmed by the sun,
filled with wind, the poem’s time is not yet done.