Poetry about Poetry ... original or previously published poetry, September 2001
Dialogue
Every poem
is a dialogue
to which the reader brings
at least as much as the writer.
When the poet
says that the evening mist
rising from the fields
reminds him of lost love,
the reader enriches the poem
with a memory of city bus stops
in April.
When the poet
describes his early deflowering
in a Worcestershire cowshed,
the reader,
brought face to face
with his unbearable failure
to pay off his mortgage,
goes and hangs himself.