For A.E. Stallings
Please welcome the paradoxical
And the beautiful.
Beware. Not beautiful could be beautiful.
Or better. In your sorrow, irate and bitter,
The beautiful is not very beautiful.
Modern Athens, ruined Athens, and the migrants drown.
But she finds Cambridge is a crazy town.
She proved empathy inimical
To love; selfish empathy is aware
That only with advantage is it possible to care;
We are safe, and when we compare
Ourselves to the drowning—they will always be over there.
If they weren’t, we couldn’t care.
It is only because of the drowning
We feel empathy and do not care.
For those who are safe, to really care,
With empathy, or not—want is here and want is there.
Empathy is selfish, the poet said,
And by empathy into irony her audience by her poem was led.
She proves form is poetry
By proving what makes poetry poetry is almost enough
To ruin paradoxical truth
And assume the face of love.
I realize form is more necessary than I thought,
For poetry proves with its poetry
Form is more thoughtful than thought.
One Harvard grad says all her rhythm is iamb—
But different types of meter do not define meter,
Meter is meter, the idea
Of meter is the iamb itself, and every variety
Cannot exclude the iamb,
Is still based on the iamb.
Meter drowns pedantry.
She proves to us with her poetry
Paradox agrees with beauty.
Her proving is her loving,
So the child does not despair
By what the pedants compare.
Her poetry is kind: to be careless, but always fed
By beauty living in poetry which in life is always dead.