The Poet at Nine – a poem by Stuart Bartow

The Poet at Nine


knew poets to be wrinkled beings
with crazy white hair who seemed
to possess some power others didn’t have.
At nine he did not write poetry,
was a weak student, but may have intuited 
the world is a poem in need
of deciphering, that poetry might be
the only way to know. He kept busy
catching baseballs, climbing trees,
gazing into the sky, daydreaming.
He could stare into a pond
for a long time watching darters flit briefly
into view, then vanish as if real
even when unseen.

Stuart Bartow lives in the Taconics region of New York state where he chairs the Battenkill Conservancy, an environmental group working along the New York-Vermont border.  His most recent collections of poetry are Green Midnight, published by Dos Madres Press, and Invisible Dictionary (haibun), published by Red Moon Press.