Garden of Verse

Some like
formality:

neat little couplets
and tercets of lawn,
gentian-pentameters,
stanzas of box-hedge,
sonnets of cypress

But I prefer free:

banks of herbaceous imagery, red
and gold metaphors, similes lush
as snowdrifts. There’s room

for wild words too, colloquial daisies,
the vulgar ragwort. Some verses

tend to straggle, must be pruned,
dead wood lopped off - but I like
the poem to form its natural
habit. A little cameo

is nice: a border, east-facing,
of Tanka japonica. But mostly free,

just keeping the edges tidy,
not letting the cliches spread.

I see a mighty epic,
deep-rooted, many-branched,
filling the space at the end of my dreams,
good for a thousand years

but there’s not enough room.
There’s room for a folly.