The Merry Month of May

If I were a poet, May would have been a busy month.

A poet, we know, is irresistibly moved by the mysterious muse

to express the inexpressible.
To find words for feelings that lie too deep for thought.

And the month of May often fills the heart.

If I were a poet my pen would have caught the transient,

fragile beauty of the flowering crab, “where the bee sucks,”

and whose pink-red petals dazzle my every May.

If I were a poet I would have celebrated in un-Hallmarkian verse

my brother’s birthday and all those days and ways

in which, as close friends, we spent time in gut-aching laughter,

serious thought, stimulating talk, and mutual affection.

If I were a poet I would have found on Mothers Day

true words of thanks for all the caring and sharing

and praying and self-giving of good mothers everywhere.

If I were a poet I would have captured through imagery

and sound and rhythm the many feelings of my heart and

my spirit’s prayer on our daughter’s birthday, who lives

her life more than 2000 miles away.

If I were a poet I would have composed a dozen sestinas

for all those who, capped and gowned, in pomp

and circumstance, celebrate a cerebral siesta after much

hard learning and weariness of the flesh. 

If I were a poet I would have exclaimed in psalms and hymns

and holy sonnets the glorious mystery, truth, and power

of Ascension, and Pentecost to follow. 

Even then, I doubt that I could have struck the human spirit

with the fullness of the awesome wonder those two events entail.

And if I were a poet I would memorialize the lives

sacrificed in too many wars.

I would in graphic detail depict the sins of slaughter,

the price of freedom, the specter of mass death. 

My conscious memory began with war, ironically

in the May time of the year. 

Those memories, mild as they are, still have the power to haunt. 

If I were a poet I would poignantly pen my pleas and prayers for peace.

But I’m not a poet. 

Still, May was busy anyway. 

And now, at Merry May’s end, I am content to sit

under pale moonlight and “let the sounds of music creep in my years:

soft stillness in the night…the touches of sweet harmony.”
For something as “full of the spirit as the month of May,”

we need a Shakespeare.

Now, there’s a poet!