ON STEPPING OUT THE DOOR ALL PAST AUTUMNS INHALED

I wish I’d never before written a poem

I wish poetry itself had never even been conceived
that I could bring you a gift
unseen before God and the angels
like the formation of the very first star
or the first new born child on Earth

but this is not to be
Yet there is beauty in the formation of all new stars
though there are a million in the universe
and isn’t each child that is born as precious as the first?

So I write this poem for you
in this way
because of poems I have written before

For even if I destroyed all my past attempts at poetry
It would be like trying to unlearn a language
or trying to forget the mechanics of walking
It is futile to romanticise naivety and deny art and evolution

My first clumsy affairs were simple couplets
juvenilia, full of basic mistakes

Later efforts showed promise but lacked true inspiration.
Limericks with the ambitions of a sonnet

Once or twice favourable development
was spoilt by an untimely ending or
the breakdown of the sense of rhyme

It seems there are very few poems these days that endure

What I would really like to write is an epic,
an all time classic, a magnum opus,
a life’s work to be left unfinished,

not the first or the last poem ever written but
a poem that would inspire all future generations
a poem that would outshine the brightest of stars
adorn the heavens and
leave even God and the angels breathless

This is the poem I would write for you