Literary Blog Hop: Favourite poetry

Literary Blog Hop is hosted by The Blue Bookcase. If you features book reviews of literary fiction, classic literature, and general literary discussion, you too can join in!

This week's question is:

What is your favorite poem and why?

This is not easy to answer. I am a poet myself and I have been reading poetry for as long as I can remember. How does one compare the ancient poets with the medieval or the modern poets? Each one has written about what was relevant in their time period. Feelings and emotions do not change essentially but our reactions do change. Language too, changes with the time. Therefore, I can go on mentioning Homer to contemporary poets, who have made an impact on me. I have liked Rumi, Kahlil Gibran, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, Robert Browning, Robert Burns, Robert Frost, Mary Oliver, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Pablo Neruda, and so many more. How do I mention only one when I like these poets and many more for entirely different reasons? 

Yet, I want to share here a poem by a Contemporary poet, Anne Caston. 

"Judah's Lion"

Irony is beyond a boy like mine. As is symbolism.
    Allegory. Metaphor, too. All is literal with him
        though that doesn't rule out a wildebeest,
the one he meets each morning in the fallow field
    beyond our yard, the one who lies beside him
        each night now in the dark.

Some morning the boy stands a long time, one hand
    shading his eyes, looking sunward, scanning the wide
        sky for that fiery wheel - Ezekiel's wheel - way up
in de middle ob de air. He says he'd like to see that
    himself. Just once. If the sun would
        get out of the way.

God has a lamb, he tells me one night after prayers,
    who followed Jesus to school just like Mary's
        lamb in the Mother Goose book.
And God? God, for him, is just one giant eye roaming to and fro    
over the dark earth, peering through the windows at night
        like some neighborhood peeping Tom.

To him, a fiery wheel is a wheel in flames, a lamb a lamb, an eye
    an eye, and as of this morning's sermon, the Lion
        of Judah - coming again, and the unholy
shall be judged and torn - is an orange cat that belongs to Judah
    Michaels, a boy who lives two door down.
        "I will kill that lion if he comes near," he mutters,

pocketing stones and pebbles as he walks all afternoon the gravel drive
    between our house and Judah's, the young tom pouncing
        bugs in the weed-riddled grass of the Michaels' front yard.
But now, the Sunday sun is almost spent and we settle
    together on the splintered back stoop while shadows
        creep forward from the field where his wildebeest waits.

While fireflies sputter on and off and crickets
    call out across the twilit lawn, he is telling me now
        about Zion, that beautiful city of God, which is
somewhere, he says, in Georgia, near Stone Mountain
    except everything there - streets, people, trees - has gone
        gold as Christmas glitter. God's people, he says,

are marching, marching upward to Zion, and he tilts
    the stick he's holding to show me how steep is the climb.
        He's going there too one day, he says, when he is big,
when he is old, when he must leave me. I stare at the darkening
    field, considering again the lilies, the wildebeest I cannot see,
        the whole thorn-torn mess a world can sometimes be.

Who wouldn't long for a Zion like his: the sky gone fiery, bright
    overhead as Ezekiel's wheel, Gabriel singing us home
        to Georgia again, this boy and me and his wildebeest,
all of us marching up, up God's glittering mountain
    where the Lamb of God and the Lion of Judah
        lie down together and wait for us

there, somewhere, in the polished hard and shining future.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is written for her son, who had a  diagnosis of Autism. Here she tries to show us the world from his point of view. This poem touches us and shows us new insights about someone who is closed in a world of his own and yet can have wonderful view of the world, in his own way. That is what is beauty of poetry.

Come share your poetry post with me. I would like that very much.