A New Orpheus

I've been a bit low on inspiration lately, sorry for the lack of new poems appearing on this blog in the last couple of months. So here's an old one, appropriately enough about the difficulties of writing... And yes, I did travel to work every day on the London Underground in those days.

A New Orpheus

The Muse is a flighty bird and proud

Who stays half hidden in her high cloud,

Will not flit down and talk to those

Who would be poets in jagged prose

And splintered lines of different sizes.

They always lack her sweet surprises,

For poetry, they say, can’t be

When God is dead, man lost – i.e.

In an age like ours. Those folks with brains

Too big to see their own chilblains

At freezing altitudes of thought

She plain dislikes, and says they ought

To learn truths they’re not looking for

In paradox and metaphor

That hint of greater relationships…

And yet she leaves in dull eclipse

Good Christian me, who would set right

Her tricky principles of flight.

She laughs at my poetic dreams

Instructing her in earnest schemes

Of fifteen couplets, more or less –

Is pleased with this one’s pointlessness.

She seldom comes to the married, who

Have wives to please and work to do,

Except, homecoming, now, again,

In snatches to the jumbling brain,

In the packed Underground: yet hurled

Up to the light of the upper world,

Our Orpheus finds his gems quite gone,

Just hears her laugh from Helicon…