Poet, I Salute You Poem by Tapera Makadho

O poet, how blessed you are,
You who have carved letters into words
And words into poems
With such precision and grace —
Teach me how to forge
Words into meaning,
How to strike the anvil of language
Until it rings with truth.

O poet, I salute you,
You who have donned the helmet of verse
And marched from your humble hamlet
Into the grand theatre of the world;
You have smelted odes of ornament
From the raw ore of human experience,
Pouring them molten into the ears of the ages
Where they cool and harden into permanence.

O poet, I salute you,
You who have a heart strong enough
To hold the world's grief without breaking;
Your poetry was engraved through hard firing,
Like the grooves cut into the barrel of a gun —
Every word rifled for accuracy,
Every line aimed at the truth
That hides behind the silence of ordinary things.
Teach me how to carve letters
Into words with meaning,
How to load my pen with purpose
And never miss.

O poet, I salute you,
You who have tamed the lion
With the whip of your words;
You have whetted all my blunt edges
Until I can slice the wind —
Until I can cut through pretence and pageantry,
Through the fog of comfortable lies,
And lay bare the naked bone of truth
For all the world to see and shudder at.

O poet, I salute you,
You who have walked through fire
And returned with poems instead of scars;
Who have swallowed the darkness whole
And exhaled it as light;
Who have taken the broken shards of the world
And mosaic'd them into beauty —
This is your gift and your burden,
Your glory and your cross.

O poet, I salute you —
For you have given voice to the voiceless,
Shelter to the homeless thought,
A home to the wandering word;
You have made the dumb page speak
And the deaf ear hear;
You have turned tears into rivers
And rivers into songs.

Teach me, O poet —
Not just how to write
But how to see;
Not just how to speak
But how to listen
To the whispering voices
That gather in the margins of the world
And wait for the one
Who is brave enough
To give them a name.