I learned haiku and limerick and rhyme.

And I learned of beats and rhythm and time.

I learned how to make a sonnet sing.

And how to give a ballad wings.

I learned the grammar don’ts and do’s.

I dreamt in Blake and Angelou.

Hughes made me shake. Poe made me shriek.

 Shakespeare made my knees feel weak.

Silverstein and Seuss were pure.

Dickinson was so unsure.

Donne was brilliant. Whitman, sharp.

Eliot’s Prufrock broke my heart.

Tennyson called me to seize my fate.

“Come my friends, ‘tis not too late.”

And Frost kept me from counting sheep

With “Miles to go before I sleep.”

But my little voice, she tries to hide.

Hoping to stay trapped inside.

And go unnoticed, silently.

So to not compete with poetry.

‘Till the day I’m taken by a hearse.

I dare not utter a single verse.

And in my epitaph please say,

“This girl took poems to her grave.

So she couldn’t fail, she wouldn’t write

Completely paralyzed by fright.

So now we mourn for we’ll never hear,

The voice that loved poems so dear.

We’ll always wonder. We’ll wish we knew.

Perhaps she was a poet too.”

Yes, perhaps she was a poet too.