by Chris and Laura Cain, Spring 2003
O grant eternal rest to that fine form
Of poem, graced by the Muse of elder days.
With meter, dignity, and sublte rhyme.
Filled with grandeur, due the highest praise,
Touching lightly on things deemed sublime
By men swayed not by cynics weary mode
Of sight. But no! they see instead the hand
Of God upon the smallest thing, and in the Ode
Give it its due. Yet now the grains of sand
Upon the shore and clouds that race abov
Are not the object of unjaded eyes
That look upon the world with artless love
And see the spark divine. Instead they prize
The well-turned phrase and clever play of words
That mark the sophist’s craft and cynic’s tongue.
Their poems are not for urns or Spring’s first birds.
Such noble, lofty things are not among
The objects that they praise. They choose instead
To mock the poem with careless, silly things.
“An Ode to Velcro/Cheese/my Socks/my Bed”
“To Acidophilus/to Buff’lo Wings”
Begin their poems and there they also end,
For nothing follows but the poet’s praise,
Not of the thing, but of his neverend-
-ing clever way of using puerile plays
On words and badly chosen, not-quite rhymes
And meter stumbling (forced as it has been
By clumsy hands), and falling down at times,
To please the jaded minds with ears of tin.
Naught pleases these who see no grand design
Behind the pleasing form of swan or tree.
To them no thing holds meaning, no divine
Creater made the mountain or the bee,
But all is accidental and so poems
Of praise are senseless or at least make sense
Only as diversion from abyssal tomes
That see the world through a post-modern lens.
Lord, shine perpetual light upon the Ode
And let it rest in peace from cynic pen
That try to make it poetry-a-la-mode,
Until one day it too shall rise again,
And not be conquered by the tyrant Worm.
