Once more with feeling
Once More, With Feeling
And if I have a soul my soul is green
And if it sings it doesn’t sing to me
And if it loves it loves externally
Both what it has and what it hasn’t seen
Sophie Hannah’s ‘A soul’
I am pig. I fly by day, unseen
but not unheard of, snuffling in the blanks
above your space. If you really mean
to catch me up, you’d better think again.
If I have a body, it must be pink,
and if I have a soul my soul is green
as mermaids’ hair beneath the silent sea.
Perhaps you think you’ll sink me in a pen
with Farmer John, in wild rusticity
wide-eyed and peering at the rising moon,
listening for that ancient tune again
(and if it sings it doesn’t sing to me).
I dip my wings in disappearing ink
in hopes of slivering just a wee bit more
into the nimbocirrus cloud of poesy.
A crowd a host of golden anaphors
will light me like a flaming link,
and if it loves it loves externally
to what it penned before. Is that, then, it?
My soul moves a thousand ways, like rude
rustics left cavorting on the village green.
No record now of what it ever meant.
This is resigned to reason, construed by
both what it has and what it hasn’t seen.