In Pursuit of Poetry

March 16, 2020 - Steven Croft - Land of the Optimistic Poets

March 16
I like the name of the website I found this morning's poem - Liquid Imagination. It claims to be where reality and fantasy blur. Intriguing, right? So I explored and managed to find this piece. Again, I was drawn in by the poem's title and I had to read it. I was not disappointed.

I really like exploring a variety of websites that have unusual poetic options. I find most poetry opens the mind and gets you thinking, but these websites provide some fresher outlooks.

Land of the Optimistic Poets by Steven Croft paints a picture... a moving picture of our world and a dreamers world. I went along for the ride. Enjoy!

Land of the Optimistic Poets
by Steven Croft
Posted on February 28, 2020

At city’s end, away from its central towers, traffic light
after traffic light, billboard after billboard, past strip clubs
liquor stores bad neighborhoods to the broken edge
of the built environment, and on, riding now the scrape
of diesel train wheels past smoking factories, brownfield
tank farms, on past roundup crops in an expanse
of agro-mega-fields, on foot now down the trail of high
voltage lines, walking on to a broken forest, growing
in civilization’s cast-out debris, and up now past the bent
fuselage of a plane caught in the climate storm’s torsion,
which could not climb, clear the mountain, left here
as a totem of escape’s impossibility

And over the mountain, over a disturbed ocean dotted by
ships trailing industrial fishing nets and on to a desert land,
its once green and vibrant contours leveled by the blast
wave when everything went wrong

And on to where plants struggle to grow again, and on,
in a sudden field of wildflowers, before a bay with
a glass-bottomed ferry, like it has been waiting to cross
these new waters filled with sea life, to an unexpected
land of forests and gentle bird songs, where strangers
pass with greetings of friendship, and up to a colonnaded
hill-top patio looking down over fields where workers
who care about the land gather in the morning before
beginning, looking down at the zero waste factories, at
several cars appearing disappearing through the trees
noiselessly on electromagnetic magic of rails, in the fresh
air of morning, the distant blue sea glass of the bay

His fever-dream passing, the poet looks out louvered
vinyl blinds, where walkways crisscross a quad between
buildings, pictures the graffitied plaza across the brick wall
securing his campus from people paying out shrinking
wages, the city’s air thick hot circling over traffic-locked
freeways, and rubbing his eyes, in the hazy blur, sees
a semester’s horizon of unmarked papers

https://liquidimagination.silverpen.org/article/land-of-the-optimistic-poets-by-...
This site has and audio track for you to listen to the poem.