Imagine

 

“Language of Stone” by M F Husain

 
imagine a million
angry hurt poets
avengers with brickbats
blunt weapons of words
raining down artful blows
upon philistine brows
raising consciousness
striking again and again
against biased indifference
to stanza and verse

patience fairly exhausted
with readers consumed
by that barbarous prose
overweening and rude
semi-literate wits
disinclined to appreciate
nights-on-end struggles
to pull from the muse
just a single apt phrase
in conveyance of mood

imagine a million
angry hurt poets
a virtual army
enlisted by passion
in liege to Apollo
their salvos of song
drowning dissonance
vanquishing language
complacent and lazily
scribbled by boors

would the world then
be better for metaphors
intercourse carried by
fluent rhetorical tropes
allegorical truth in the
place of the prosaic lie
while the poem is a challenge
the poet is honest
minds better informed
by the heart than the spleen