When they sit you down
in a dark room with no windows
and say words that weigh
more than mountains,
words that blind you
with their Antarctic diagnosis
of your hidden spaces,
words that plunge you
deep, deep under the Southern Ocean
where there are no reflections,
no shadows to sew onto your feet,
then you are not a poet.
You are a Hoff crab
choking on your own volcano,
gagging on the jokes of gravediggers,
the silence that is monochrome madness.
But when you find that the cold
is slipping into the bone,
you remember a small boy
smiling in a garden in summer,
his laughter the lightest sound
you have ever heard,
and suddenly you are swimming back up
with every last shard of your strength
till you find again the hole in the ice
and you burst through into a sky
that is hope, that is love, that is poetry.