A contribution to the National Poetry Day

The ancient scrolls still hum beneath our hands,

Where Dante penned his vision of the damned,

And Shakespeare wove the web of love’s despair,

Their words like fire, fierce upon the tongue.

 

Yet what of now, in cities loud with steel?

Do poets falter when the heart’s revealed?

Do sonnets crumble under neon glare,

Or still they pulse, where breathless lives are spun?

 

To write is not some relic’s futile task,

Nor caught in time’s long grip, a hollow mask.

It lives, as Rumi’s verses still ignite,

Or Dickinson’s cold stillness sparks new life.

 

For here, within our chests, the embers glow—

A tender ache the ages only know.

We craft our lines, not shackled to the past,

But speaking truths that still hold fast today.

 

In 2024, we bleed the same,

Our fears still rise, our passions still untamed.

No ancient voice can speak the world we feel,

Yet poetry remains our deepest art.

 

To carve out form from chaos, night, and thought—

To render what can’t otherwise be caught.

A poem roars where reason dares not tread,

It speaks the unsaid things we leave unsaid.

 

And so we turn our eyes, not to the old,

But to the endless surge of what’s untold:

The intimate, the fractured, and the whole—

The ever-waking world within the soul.