World Poetry Day: a poem by Yours Truly

Today is apparently World Poetry Day,

I’m marking it in my own special way.

For when could there ever be a better time

To post an apt tribute completely in rhyme?

I’m partial to Wordsworth and a smatt’ring of Shelley,

Blake’s symbolic obscurity just turns me to jelly.

There’s Tennyson, Auden, T.S. Eliot, and Yeats,

Spenser, Burns, Byron, and David Bates.

Who is your fave? If you really can’t choose

What about the jazz poems of the great Langston Hughes?

Or the synaesthetic ‘Voyelles’ of Arthur Rimbaud,

Or perhaps Updike and his ‘Flight to Limbo’?

And then maybe if you’re feeling a little bit cocky

You could always recite Carroll’s ‘The Jabberwocky’.

Or the wit and the humour in the rhymes that she shares –

The humorous verse of the brilliant Pam Ayres.

Kipling and Rumi, Spike’s ‘Ning Nang Nong’,

A few quotes from Doc Seuss and you can’t go wrong.

And I’m sure that most people will have come across

Coleridge’s rime of the Mariner and the dread albatross.

If you think that poetry is by nature quite stuffy,

I urge you to read some by Carol Ann Duffy.

And then you will see that this view is debatable

Through emotional poems which are very relatable.

Great poems are the products of genius inventions,

And can appear in a wealth of different dimensions.

Such as limericks, sonnets, haikus or epics

And

Sometimes

They don’t even rhyme at all.

So on this special day you could do much worse

Than seek out a few of these masters of verse.

And now all it leaves me to do is to say

Have a very happy World Poetry Day.