Home ⇒ 📌Billy Collins ⇒ Introduction To Poetry
Introduction To Poetry
I ask them to take a poem
And hold it up to the light
Like a color slide
Or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
And watch him probe his way out,
Or walk inside the poem’s room
And feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
Across the surface of a poem
Waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
Is tie the poem to a chair with rope
And torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
To find out what it really means.
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