there are better poems

There are better poems, out there in the morning’s light
curled around the roots and caught upon the briers
Just like our better angels lying mostly hidden,
secretively suspended between moments of perception

the space between a yellow hammer’s song and the rustle of the birch
by the river in the wind, the chatter of blackbirds, the seeming stillness of the earth,
is no space at all, a poetry
of non-exclusion,
where taxonomies and grammars have no purchase, and particles touch mountains
a whole that we can never map nor model,
far beyond our mind’s narrow wanderings
with all its chatter, labels, and anxiety.

There are better poems, we float among them in our more magic moments
and drifting with no compass lose our lonely purpose.

Mike O’Kane, Dumfries 2019