Some poems are easy to eat

candied words sour or sweet.

Some poems are simply baby mush,

others cooked to make the genteel blush.

Some poems herb and spice the mind,

words healing, caring, loving, kind.

Some taste tainted by greed and deceit.

Others are the challenge of tough meat

hard to chew… Swallow or Spit?

Nutritious food or processed shit?

Some poems are savoured ‘scriptures’-

favoured recipes reverentially passed on

with communal blessings and sacred song.

Cultures create lyrical ‘dishes’- rhyming songs.

Religions ‘en-chant’ with chants, prayers, psalms-

tasting the power of the spoken Word

sanctified, deified, translated, Heard.

Some poems are aromatic invitations to dine-

imaginative feasts with charms of wine.

Some are a strange Language, even one’s own,

mysterious metaphors, offerings unknown

from another time or this, as in a dream…

What does it mean? What does it mean?

(March 6, 2020- Shelley Wilson)

May I never

be always content

just to sit lazily,

childishly, immaturely

in my ‘familiar box’

of passed on beliefs.

May I never

fear to question it all-

all I’ve been taught,

everything I’ve read,

everything I see and hear,

yet open to ‘layered truths’

shining through crystal clear.

(March 4, 2010- Shelley Wilson)

May I ever

free myself quickly

at the first signs of

‘storms of confusion’,

‘droughts of despair’

and ‘floods of lies’.

May I ever choose

not to ‘dumb down’

with the herded masses

when my inner compass

says to ‘smarten up’,

to question, stretch and grow,

to ‘brighten up’, to ‘shine’

and to humbly ‘glow’.

(March 4, 2020- Shelley Wilson)

Perhaps…

Earth is a living Library

with Interstellar donations

and Intergalactic loans-

forms of Information

in flora and fauna-

Trees and Fish and Birds…

and the slowly evolving

‘plantings’ of a species

known here as Man.

(March 1, 2020-

Shelley Wilson)