As humans, our imagination flies beyond our feet

Like magpies, who rise in their splendorous iridescence

And show us all the colours of the rainbow;

 

As people, our imagination walks at our feet

Like Kiwis, who crawl under the shadows of green

And envy the trees who shake all of Earth with their legendary conversations;

 

As poets, our imagination swims below our feet

Like penguins, who jump at the unknown depths of an empty Earth

And accept, among the freezing waters, that they will never fly.

 

Us penguins, we know the cold;

We live in the cold;

We are the cold.

 

And we throw ourselves

In the yet colder depths of the human soul

To know ourselves before they give us identity.

 

And we swim among words

But we do not let them shape us.

We shape them.

 

What is a simile but a sign of envy?

A word that wishes it were another one?

It sure doesn’t know poetry, for it doesn’t accept itself.

 

But we teach it to know itself

And it expresses its own beauty in its neighbors

Like a penguin dancing to its own image on an iceberg.

 

And clouds and shadows are behind us

For we are a shadow of our past

And icebergs bloviate their art with the clouds and their shadows.

 

We are the penguins.

We dance with words.

We know ourselves.

 

(Is it acceptable that the people of the most powerful countries in the world know nothing of poetry?)