What avails invoking the spirit
Of Ashbery Dickinson or Wordsworth
Those feckless aesthetes
In the estimation of the practical
When folks conveniently believe
That poetry butters no parsnips
Butter apparently a superb commodity
The outer limit of mundane value
Who chow down perhaps on raw root
Who attempt to hold as true
The most outrageous falsehoods
Who condemn pellucid metaphor as lie
While garnishing with fruit the idols
Of god and priest and king
Heeding the austere word of the father
The garbled antediluvian word
Demanding sacrifice
Who could know if only they were willing
That all the force of nature
Gives us to feast and not merely feed
Yet even their lowly obeisance demonstrates
That culture will persist
As long as does the human species
Culture a genetic trait of homo
While earth stands at the verge
Of a great extinction event
And no clever father to build an ark
No Ararat to offer the mooring of destination
No Aeneas no Paul no Chingachgook
Already having entered a phase of extinction
And who knows which species will be elect
And which cast into perdition
The canary or the toad
The redwood or the daffodil
And someone must find a language
No
Survival not a necessity
But quite the contrary
Extinction is the norm
And so someone merely should
Find such a language
Find not devise
Or first find and only then devise
For device lends decorum
To the natural materials
In this case socioneurological
For culture is if anything is
The stuff of nature
The nature of humans
Social beings convivial
And who will find the words
And find the woven sentences
And find intelligible utterance
Like Heaney to speak
The shocking but unsurprising troubles