Why

Do persons, people
Of my acquaintance

Who will nearly weep
For the faint nuance

Contained in the phrase
"I wrote poetry

In my younger days,
Long before thirty,

Before I knew much
About what I liked,"

Refuse such and such
Verse, such and such type?

Everyone of us
Has to learn sometime

Every word's too much,
Every swerve and rhyme,

Every return dark
As lunar eclipse

Once we have embarked
From the blank boat slip

Where the trout that lisps
Silver whisperings,

The doubt that hisses
Waves of mysteries,

The old poetic,
Lyric lies that lie,

Rise up, weird, hectic
And demand we die,

That God is our loss,
Loss our forgiveness,

Poems are the cost
Of lost resistance.