On The Appeal Of Poetry Poem by Dritëro Agolli

You say that I've written too much about cows,
And of grain in the fields I have penned too much verse.
So what? You have butter and milk in the morning,
At supper there's always that little white roll
On your plate, and beside it you clamour for meat.
You assert that we lose some poetic excitement
When mentioning cows all the time in our verse,
The appeal of a poem, you say's not from pastures,
But rather when under our skin a line bursts
With words, you insist, from some lofty preserve.

Yet listen, I've never, as much as I wanted,
Gone on about cows, yes, they merit much more,
I can't sever them from my pen and my paper,
It's cows that inspire me, my spring and my fall,
I would, if I could, teach them how to write poems.

I'm sure they'd be better than most of our bards!

(1984)