Why leap out of bed at midnight
to save a line from dissolving before dawn
when the heartland of poetry is oblivion?

Millions of invisible poets
are leaping out of warm beds,
they pass like a cloud's shadow.

Leaping for the distilled mood of a season
not this occasion or that
not expecting to stop a tank.

But how many must be the ways:
unbottling the moonshine
laid down by a poet.

Let the odds be a million to one
from heron-wardened hidden courses
through country floodplains pulsing

rare spirits will ever make the great river
populated by dabblers and ferrymen
and the houses of a nation set around.

So let them all drink to this: the poem 
does stop tanks in their tracks 
a million times over, just give the word.