Luminous Beast

bobby byrd at his son's wedding

Luminous Beast

I’ve said this before but,
since I’m getting old,
it’s okay to repeat myself.

Jerome Rothenberg (I think it was him)
called poetry “a luminous beast.”
Some sort of mythological animal
that embodied the words and poems
and ideas of all poets.

The tail of this beast stretches back
into pre-literate times when history was story
and poetry was spoken language
that had the power to shape the natural world.
And it still survives in our language
in these digitized bits of information
on a computer screen.

In poems we all provide sustenance to the beast
as it squirms its way into the 21st Century.
Like the Tao, it knows its way.
I’ve come to trust the beast’s instincts explicitly.

Bobby Byrd

Posted over on his site White Panties and Dead Friends