मार्क स्ट्रैंड की आवाज़ में ‘द पोयम’

मार्क स्ट्रैंड की आवाज़ में उनकी कविता ‘द पोयम’

Dear Reader,

Though I spend my days and nights in hiding, wanting your attention and fearing it will be no more than the sad interest success finds in failure, my faith in you has never been shaken, for only in you do my poems have life. There is no limit to what you make possible. That is why I have wanted for the longest time to give you something. Accept the enclosed poem as an attempt to present the self I have so long hidden.

Dear Poet,

Thank you for the poem.  I liked the part about the bird and the part about the tree and I like it when you talk about the hard cold ground and the hard cold stars – like the woman's stare which was hard and cold, and the man's arms which were that way too.

Knowledge for some of us who live on the farm is hard to come by, especially knowledge of how things really are; so to read your poems gives us hope.  What is tenderness anyway if it can't be relied on to teach us a little something?  After all, the world is hard and cold, and almost everyone has problems.  The farmer next door wears a costume, and my wife has her doubts about me.  But that is neither here nor there.  What matters most, and you put it so well, is that the bird is in the tree.  Still, we must strive, which is what you must have meant when you said, "the fish leaps unnetted into sunrise."  Who cares if it's salmon or trout?  The big thing is the fish leaps.  It is that sort of observation which makes such a difference. 

Just yesterday the farmer next door told me a terrible story (never mind what it was) to amuse me.  Such daily occurrences may relax us into states of well-being, but they don't build character.  I was left with an empty feeling all over.  So I went to the kitchen and picked up your poem again. My breath quickened when I realized that the fish you mentioned must have been heading upstream to lay its eggs, and that the bird had flown into the tree to avoid the hard cold ground – and the stare of the woman sitting next to the muscular man.  We live in need of such uplift, and I for one thank you for providing it.  Don't hesitate to write me again.

Sincerely yours,