Refurbished, rewaxed, and now shining
the words seem at the start.
It’s called poetry, they say, and it’s all the rage:
A new, clean, and chic kind of art.

And the words, polished raw, fall from their lips
Like smooth pebbles, grey, bare as bone.
And although these pale happenings appear to be bright,
They don’t shine like they once had shone.

The new tales make rivers flow,
But the old tales made oceans churn and vast storms roil.
Their song did not chime a melody
It pierced the air with waves of joy and sorrow.

Their mouths did not recite a story, start to finish;
They bellowed with the voice of time itself,
From the beginning of existence to the inevitable end, never stopping, just going.

For when the old tales were told, the stars did not shine, they glistened.
And the rain did not fall,
It downpoured upon the earth and soaked all in a shower of meaning.

They went not verse by verse, but creation by creation
Each blossoming into a new expression of uniqueness and perfection;
Not a sandpapered, bleak perfection
But one made up of individual, precious imperfections.

The moon did not merely reflect light off of another,
It had its own mystical kind of glow,
That which could not be expressed in a few smoothed over,
Sugar coated words from the new tales.

For in the old tales, the wind did not blow,
It roared in gusts of unrestrained passion, endless bursts of ideas.
And in the old tales, the hawks did not fly, they soared.