Here is a poem that was published in another of my favorite online places, Vox Poetica, back in 2011. It was a little different then. Here is the link to its appearance in Annmarie Lockhart’s lovely daily poem blog.
To Be Like Poems
There is something about the way
a poem sits on a page surrounded
by so much white space, the stanzas boldly
declaring their independence, the lines,
rarely reaching the margin, yet
taking themselves so seriously,
believing they deserve to be broken,
set apart, spoken in single,
emphatic expulsions of breath, the words
carefully chosen for sound, denotation,
connotation, association, intentionally placed,
measured, juxtaposed, the crisp
black curls and lines of letters
staunchly denying the oppression of the void,
crush of prose, even a title
given to somewhere between 5 words,
the shortest decent poem I’ve ever
read, and a couple hundred,
sometimes even a byline for what
might only be a single sentence
that makes me think there might be hope
for us all if we could learn to be
like poems, vital, connected, leaning
into the moment a little harder.