~ aesthete ascetic ~

The Poets Speaking Beauty
by Nordette Adams
The poets must dream beauty.
Ugly,
the truth of man,
crawls a nightmare in the day,
laden with hideous creatures, bold and truculent,
breathing Earth's undoing--
the streams polluted, rain forests raped,
godless prayers and chanting hate,
children's corpses left unburied,
strewn at the cities' gates,
the zombie throng, the witless masses,
and kings swaying to the clatter of bones--
Wisdom deprivation.
The poets must dream beauty against annihilation.
The poets must eat beauty.
Wherever finding the plump golden fruit
seize and gobble, chew and churn,
cogitate, regurgitate beauty.
The ugly swells churlish yet giddy with glee,
overshadowing charity with greed,
obese with the hearts of skinny dreamers slain.
It rolls through the woods and over
the plains of man's festering wounds,
the flies and worms its dessert.
So the poets must eat beauty,
chew, cogitate, regurgitate beauty
over blighted plains and into
the darkened wood,
into Earth's streams and her prayers and her open sores,
into the ripped seams of humanity.
The poets . . .
The poets . . .
The poets must ink beauty
into the skins of souls,
from crown to toe tattoo Divine,
purple curlicues of beauty.
Everyday with relentless piercings,
the ugly's inked a heinous scarlet,
the blood of junkies young and
younger stabbing needles into veins,
dealers dealing guns, crack cocaine,
drive-by shootings where toddlers play,
Baghdad bombings, London blasts,
Ground Zero-shrouded memories
seething prophecies of a mushroom cloud from oil,
and global warming because we're spoiled with convenience,
in love with SUVs,
yet relinquish freedom to bubble wrap of fear-factoring authorities.
We waltz to the white noise of terrorist shit
and domestic abominations,
signs of not the times but our madness,
like that woman who murdered that mother and carved that baby
from the womb like a Sierra Leone butcher or a Darfur slayer.
She grew horns and hooves and drowned her sister's children.
The ugly's inked graffiti onto man's tomb,
making proper the grave.
The poets must speak beauty.
Ugly rots man's mouth.
Who must speak its stench?
And only the blind fail to see
the truth of man's depravity.
So, the poets must dream, eat, and ink beauty.
Poets must speak beauty until Beauty comes to feast.
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