Poetry

I'm not necessarily a big poetry fan. There are some poems and some poets I like, and then there are the rest that I feel relatively ambivalent about. I used to be a big poetry freak - Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Marianne Moore. For whatever reason, I've been thinking about poetry lately, and I found this old one by Marianne Moore. Moore could get kinda romantic but she could also just say it like it is. There's a poem she wrote called "Poetry." It starts off like this:

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
    all this fiddle.
 Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
    discovers in
 it after all, a place for the genuine.

See what I'm saying? I like her a lot. But I actually wanted to post this one, called "What Are Years?"

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt, -
dumbly calling, deafly listening-that
in misfortune, even death,
encourage others
and in it's defeat, stirs

the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accededs to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.

So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.