Greatest Wonder

THE GREATEST WONDER

I have found this dusty old book full of poems no-one has ever
read
and each one I read makes me jump from my chair and roar with
amazement
they make Dante and Shakespeare and all that gang look like slovenly
beginners
they utter truths of such profound simplicity with images of such
purity
lucidity and inevitability
that all life's problems are not exactly solved but explained
to an accuracy of one billionth of one degree
and with a consolatory sympathy that cheers even an old cynic like
me
but that is not the greatest wonder

all are written by different hands and in different inks
and some on stone and some on papyrus and some on Woolworth's cheapest
writing pads
and according to a note in the front
none has ever been published - their authors shunned publicity -
they were all complete unknowns
but they were the greatest bards who ever lived and some are still
among us
pretending to be someone else
even their wives and mothers don't suspect the colossal stature of
their sentence structure
look closely at your postman, dustman, cleaner - she could well be
one
but that is not the greatest wonder

the images they use, the pictures that they paint in words
the comparisons and metaphors and similes are so damned fresh
and clean and unexpected but so exactly right that each one slams you
like a snowball on the ear
but that is such a lousy image when compared to those this book
contains
images of birds and planets, skeletons and dust and blood and ships and
waves and lightning and babies' cheeks and elephants' tusks and
mermaids' arses
all framed to clothe devastatingly delectable constructions
but that is not the greatest wonder

I found the book tucked down behind the cushions of an old red plush
sofa
in a provincial auction room in northern England
and tonight I lie on that sofa with the book in my hand
a tatty but undeniably fat old book of some five hundred close packed
pages
containing perhaps three hundred poems -
the three hundred greatest poems in our language or any other
and not a line of them ever printed, published or shown to mortal
soul
and I am badly tempted badly tempted to pass them off as my own
no-one would know and I'd be loved by women
and crowned king and made prime minister and president
and hailed as the most terrific human ever known
but that is not the greatest wonder...