Plumed Serpent/Fabled Phoenix/Rare Black Swan:
Let Poetry now shoot you from the sky;
Your sin, though trendy, shall no more rage on . . .
They’ll see you’re just a Dodo by and by.
You puffed and fanned, a dazzling Peacock Star
It’s high time you descended here to earth.
We see you for the Emu that you are:
Your gender, like your sex—assigned at birth.
Huddled in your castles like Prospero’s doomed revelers, sighing in the springtime of contagion, you evade and avoid the obvious. But the Muse has entered, unseen, and stands among you in her mask of elegiac splendor. She smiles as you mock her presence. She laughs quietly to herself as her influence wafts upon the very air, inspiring and infecting all concerned. You try to protect yourselves from the lyric epidemic, nonetheless her viral poetic molecules go forth, regroup, mutate, and attach themselves to the souls of her detractors. Her spores hang upon the very droplets of the mist, a suspended Parnassian miasma. The first tremors of poetic sickness begin to shudder deep within and among the most reluctant revelers. They try to dispel their fears; they brag and congratulate themselves, chattering about the uselessness of poetry, listing all they ways in which they have successfully barricaded themselves from her pestilential presence. But the Muse has entered and none can ensure her departure. Poetry will have her way and resistance is futile. Some will survive, but others will meet her as their avenging angel of the plague, and neither Egyptian magic nor sanitizing legerdemain shall deter the blossoming vector of her influence. Fear, oh unpoetic readers, this sudden lyrical acceleration, this verdant celebration:
our poetic coronation.
As a poetry site I really like Hello Poetry. It is user-friendly and uncluttered. It is easy to comment and message other poets. It’s a sort of lyrical Facebook without the bells and whistles. A nice feature they provide is a count of how many views a poem gets over time. In this day and age, one never knows if these stats are truthful, algorithmic hype or fake, but accepting the bean counters at face value, here are my ten most-read poems since I began posting at the site in 2015. They range, top to bottom (if one believes the stats), from 29K+ views down to 13K+ views. Strangely enough, John Greenleaf Whittier’s Snow-bound which I posted there in its entirety, came in at number nine with 14K+ views. I wonder: are people actually reading these ?
Hey there y’all. Jest thought I would tell you what I been up to during this old LOCKDOWN by the dang federals and globalists and teknocrats. Due to Satan, China, and George Soros inflicting this scourge upon our beloved nation, I done had to stay hunkered down in muh cabin with muh fambly. CHINESE Chest Cold all it is, and I don’t care what the One World Guvermint says, I AINT EATIN’ no BATS. Damn commie Chinese need JESUS I’ll tell you that. Now whar wuz I? Oh yeah:
We pretty much been prayin’ non-stop to the Lord, readin’ our Bibles and listenin’ to daddy Donald on the short-wave television. He shore is smart and we thank God Almighty for him AND his wife what’s-her-name. (She’s real pretty—for a Yuropean that is . . .) And lucky for us he come up with a good plan to help us all overcome this great tribulation of the Last Days, amen. Presidint Trump is going to take that old W.H.O. down a peg or two. And all them thankless adversaries runnin’ their jaws a-complainin’ all day long kin go figger. Anyway, we sit around a lot . . . muh wife bakes some cornpone . . . we fry a little bacon any old time. Muh kids play and squabble and ask to borry muh tablet (y’all know how it is) but I cain’t say it’s been easy. I have touched a drop a half jug some corn likker, and although I am shamed to say, I have done beat muh dear wife somewhat (but never in front of the little ones and only when she sassed me).
Well, the good news from all these trials and tribulations is:
National Poetry Writing Month is comin’ along real SOON in April! You might not have thunk a ol’ deeplorable hillbilly like me would appreciate POETRY now would you? I hope the president can git everthang on track for all of us soon and we kin all git back to writin’ POEMS in the springtime.
And after the summer gits over we can drag our ol’ knuckles over to the votin’ station and cast our ballots, yes siree.
So that’s how it been here in Hickry Holler tryin’ (as the city slickers and federal agents like to call it) SOCIALLY DISTANCEing our pore selfs from everthang. I hope you folks is doin’ rightly and see you soon Lord willing.
