Michael Shepherd Metaphor Poems

A pretty girl
is like a simile
and vice-a-versa
so I'd say
...

Metaphor’s the soul of poetry:
this incongruous instrument of speech
with which we say one thing,
when we mean quite another:
...

and perhaps I came to poetry too late
to dive, a slimmish youth,
innocent as youth was or is
into the rich waters of the lake of metaphor
...

Like a favourite vase,
newly washed, saying
I'm beautiful as I am,
empty yet shining,
...

After you’ve negotiated that artfully-conceived
sharp elbow bend in the long, grand drive
through the fields of its estate,
and it hoves into view,
...

True, I can rhyme – endwords, and inner too;
fangle fine assonance, like thought made new;
march to a metre –regular in tread
or cunningly disjointed – silken, the thread
...

Like the unicorn,
they have to need to be;
to hear our need for them to be.
...

I was born to be a metaphor;
Darwin, embarrassed, did not talk of me;
I did not fit into his scheme of things; I,
knowing secrets of the tears of things,
...

It’s not a playground where
you run around shouting
without noticing whether
there’s a listener
...

Simile – what looks like something else –
that’s a fun game for the senses,
for the mind: oh look Dad,
there’s a scarecrow in that field
...

When a metaphor on blessed wings
flies to the heart like Mary’s dove

or when you seek it, you grimed with earth,
...