Our poems Are like the wart-hogs In the zoo It's hard to say Why there should be such creatures
But once our life gets into them As sometimes happens Our poems Turn into living things And there's no arguing With living things They are The way they are
Our poems May be rough Or delicate Little Or great
But always They have inside them A confluence of cries And secret languages
And always The are improvident And free They keep A kind of Sabbath
They play On sooty fire escapes And window ledges
They wander in and out Of jails and gardens They sparkle In the deep mines They sing In breaking waves And rock like wooden cradles.
From Living Things: Collected Poems, by Anne Porter. Reprinted with permission from Steerforth Press.
