Poetry Thursday - Sixteen by Brian Patten

1962

Sixteen

Sixteen, Rimbaud and Whitman my heroes
'PS I Love You' playing in the loud cafés
In a Canning Street basement Adrian Henri
Painting The Entry of Christ into Liverpool

Adrift in an attic, in an ark buoyant with longings,
A map drawn by Garcia Lorca open before me
There was nothing that was not possible
Nothing that could not be reinvented

Ah poetry, at sixteen
Words smelled of tulips and marigold
Their fumes made sentences
That the bees stole for themselves

- Brian Patten (from Jubilee Lines: 60 poets for 60 years, ed Carol Ann Duffy)


"One of the things a Poem can do
Is remind us of things
We forget we knew" says Brian Patten's website.

How true
How true