found another poem

 I wrote a bunch of (mostly free-verse type) poetry in 2019. Most of it I didn't think was very good but I saved it anyway. I have few memories of what I wrote - this was in the couple months after my dad's death and my memory wasn't functioning well then. 

It surprises me when I find them again. I ran across this one today on my work-box while looking for a draft of a manuscript. I read it again and was struck by the fact that it was not nearly as bad as I thought. (I cannot speak to the accuracy of my assumptions about the people I cite; I didn't do background research for this, I think. If I remember at all, I heard the Borodin quotation I give on one of the classical music stations I listen to)

Anyway, here it is:

Patron Saints

 

Borodin, bending over the lab bench,

Writing less music because chemistry fed his family

Did he ever regret that fewer pieces left his pen, instead

Of the ephemeral academic work?

 

Or, as is quoted, did he actually believe

"Respectable people do not write music or make love as a career."

And see his gift as a mere hobby to fill the hours when ill?

 

Owen, the soldier-poet, writing his pieces

In one short year of life

Before returning to the battlefield

Where he gave his all

What more writing might we have

If he had been fully invalided-out after that shell-shock.

 

Brahms, receiving a strongly-worded request to “thank” a university

For an honorary degree by writing them a piece of music

Mashing-up student drinking songs; I imagine him thinking

“This’ll show them.”

 

The nameless Caryatid that Rodin sculpted several times,

And Heinlein wrote about,

So serious, so unhappy in her failures.

Every man, every woman, who felt “not enough.”

Every person pushed, tired of doing things they would rather not

But who did them anyway

 

All those, sung and unsung, who did what they must

Rather than what they wished

May they, in some happy Elysian field,

Find the time – oh, time enough of eternity –

To create the things that this Earth did not deserve.