A Poem Written in reply to Don Share's Tweet

 

This poem is the result of an exchange on Twitter prompted by Don Share's tweet (in which he quoted the novelist Ali Smith as saying that poets should revere translators) to which I then replied reverence has nothing to do with it -- which as a translator I feel entitled to say -- and he replied he reveres his masters and so on....

And so we tweeted

Back and forth the other day

About the aptness of reverence

For poets and translators
Masterful or otherwise

Yet there was one more thing

I still wanted to say

Because even for poets

I’m inclined to revere

-- like Neruda Akhmatova or Blake --

I would be astonished

If any one of them 

Had ever intended

For their words

To be fetishized thus

Or construed so as to impose

An anthropomorphic gloss

On what is and always

Remains a matter of

The poet’s deepest

Abiding faith

To say nothing

Of the greatest sages of all time

Such as Lao Tzu and Zhuang Zhou

For whom meaning subsumed 

To the messenger  

Would be inimical 

To the Dao itself

And so it goes with

The best of poems

As with any testament or sutra

That it may be understood

More as means to an end

Or an expression of striving

Rather than exalted as

An end or meaning that's
Been fully attained