Sonnet CCXC

A worthy novel grips me for a week or two.
Upon its end I find myself dissatisfied.
The themes are dull, the scenes are plain, the prose is dry.
Sparse millions of phrases drift unto the new.

A poem’s brief. Just forty words suffice for you.
And yet, those cautious forty words stick more in mind
than fifty thousand, spread within a novel’s bind.
Poetic words are crafted so they make us brood -
until – they’re solved – those riddles needing different keys,
depending on the eye unlocking what they keep.

Unlike a novel – poems stay with us, for life.
No tree nor sky nor robin looks the same again.
We wonder how our poets craft such skilful rhymes
that so succinctly captive the lives we tend.