Against decadent decay

A world put under the mind’s scalpel
that world within a world
of words and nouns and verbs
a poetry of things that co-opts them
into the world of thought and feeling

Who salutes the morning dew
or pays homage to the heroic harvest
or sings of time’s magnificence
and all that filters through it
who sets the frailty of rosebuds
against the strength of love
Whose naming encompasses
the sun and the moon and the stars
or traps the compelling beauty
of the cosmos in order to investigate
the vast poetics of space
with all its untold relativities
so that no thing remains dumb
or inanimate or is abandoned
to the decaying decadence of defeat ?

John Lyons