Who am I to Question Why?

Who am I to question why a poem wants to be

free to run about and play, not locked in symmetry?

Forget about the proper form, the feet and meter verse,

complaints it doesn’t scan and such. I don’t write poetry.

I simply let the words go loose to wander where they may,

touch a spot, move over there, take a hike and so.

There’s magic in the scenery when words are free to go

any where they want to be and tell us what they see.

Keep your sonnets, villanelles, triolets, and such,

they’re too much like doing math, their patterns carved in rock.

Each word chosen with such care, it loses all its joy,

dragged by serif, stuck in line, like sinner in a corner.

Let them run about, I say, though it’s so hard to do

with feet and meter pounded in when I was in high school.

But who am I to question why a poem wants to soar

about the sky and through the clouds and surf a moonbeam’s ray?

A well-thumbed book sits on a shelf with rhymes for ev’ry sound,

another way to capture words and keep them on a page.

But who am I to question why a poem wants to fly?

I’ll sit back and watch the show, ‘cause I don’t write poetry.