What Do Poems Want?

Folks go to poems
To get some peace
When they feel bad,
To steal some words

They use for love
In their own poems,
To get or hold
Love close to them.

Once in a while,
Poems are for prayer.
Poems read to think
Are rare, but poems

Read for war or
For the just cause
Get their share. Poems
Wish poems were theirs.

Eye Spot

And what is the good of a poem,
Prose asks, if it can’t give you loss

In true form, the way all is lost?
Mind, this comes from prose that loves poems,

Loves verse in print, the glass-pressed weeds
Of songs, tales, and hand-me-down thoughts,

Lines of mixed roots, all kinds of grafts.
She does not ask what good is it

To show you she thinks it’s no good.
She asks to point you to her core

Sense of what gives poems their real worth—
Loss and the truth of loss. But poems

Aren’t so sure that is the pure job
Of a poem. Pain and death make loss,

And it seems to the poems all arts—
Cave paint, folk dance, wrought hoards in tombs—

Have a go at loss. What’s the use?
What is the good of a poem? Ah.

To bend words you can hold in mind,
Knots, hooks to work with or hang up

As tools near to hand, shields, fixed spells
To ward off worse ghosts with false eyes.