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)