Another tongue

I want to share with you, the fact that the following poem is in response to a contest...to write on the subject of poetry! Here was my entry:

Another tongue

If passion speaks beyond self-centered will,
if stones may cry aloud because a man
keeps silence, or if whispers wash the mind
as storms in springtime will refresh the earth,
then it is poetry that feeds our hearts.

At birth it is a soft caress that would
protect and nourish thought in gentleness,
to draw from deep within, a song that prose
could not express, a sigh devoid of art
that art alone may sing, the singer but
an instrument, and that of conscious awe.

All this, and still demanding to be heard,
for if it were not so, we would not know
or speak of poets; wars might then be just
regretted or dismissed as lost for lack
of strategy; arms would be taken up
for power alone and men would then survive
in shallow grief, insouciant within,
a tired state of lethargy, where no one
ever cares.

The powers of heavenly places may be thanked,
for muses dwell upon Olympus, not
within the hell of circumstance or haste
or juvenile romance--for there
is power indeed when insight travels where
the lofty giants led and left upon
their pages majesty, and bled, and wept,
and gave us beauty that device alone
could try to emulate, but merely fade
and vanish from the mind.