That's What I Call Poetry

A shrinking violet I am not,
so I’ll get this off my chest,
despite the things they hurl at me –
even branding me a ‘pleb’;

a lot of what gets writ these days
makes no blinking sense at all,
and poems what don’t even rhyme
are dia-bol-ical!

It’s common sense, well ain’t it mate?
Take your Tennyson and Blake,
even Shakespeare when he felt so moved,
wrote rhymes, for pity’s sake!

True, I never went to Eton –
just that uni they call ‘life’, but,
for what it’s worth, old Wordsworth
was a gaffer what could write;

whilst walking, lonely as a cloud,
there was daisies on those hills,
yet he saw them with a poet’s eye,
and called them daffodils.

And William Blake, the author
of ‘this green and pleasant land’,
waxed lyrical of chimney sweeps,
and the virtues of a lamb.

Pukka poets...through and through
who shaped our history
they knew their onions, right enough,
these men of brevity.

If they could have their time again
I am certain they’d agree
a poem’s not a poem
if it isn’t poetry.