April is National Poetry Month...

and spring. Here's a poem that celebrates both poetry and seasonal profusion. Read on and you will fulfil your statutory obligation to read a poem this month.



BULL’S EYE

For me a poem
is worked soil
turned and watered
a thousand times over
green profusions pruned
with blunt tools
strangling weeds uprooted
dug out stones cast aside
on a growing pile
sweaty body bending
as praying bodies must
that draw closer to their source
sifting pale fingers squirming
through black earth till
my stiff spine
refuses to straighten up again.

Amid the struggle questions occur:
Does the perfect poem radiate
like a garden in bloom
multi-coloured bands expanding
outward forever?
Or does it zero in
on a single symmetrical flower
a golden bull’s-eye word
the unpronounceable Name
as succinct, precise and encompassing
as the well-aimed arrow-point
embedded in silence?
And how can a tired man
awaken from his cramped cage of bones
to yawn and stretch
at the long day before it reaches
its unheralded conclusion?