! Portraits After Death; Rhyme After Time Poem by Michael Shepherd

and a poet I was reading yesterday
said, have you noticed
that portraits of people change
after they die?

and I’ve noticed that portraits
of Princess Diana
now look to me as if
she’s a sad schemer

I don’t like this at all.
I feel dirty, as if
I’d been manipulated
when all I want to do
is, to see the goodness and the beauty in her

It’s the same with rhyme:
when I see rhyme
(hearing it doesn’t worry me so much,
as if the time of reading it
heals it in some way) -

it seems like sad scheming
as when Robert Frost
has to take the road pre-planned
by language and the rhyming dictionary
and very obviously rhymes
future with suture

I don’t like this at all, either:
It never used to worry me; now
I start to look cynically
at every poem that rhymes
in the convention of its times
(that rhyme was not planned
deliberately..) –
look cynically, to see
which was the chosen word,
the direction of the poet’s thought;
and which the ‘fill-in’, like
some silly puzzle; even if
it stimulates the poet’s imagination
perhaps

I don’t like either of these phenomena
in actuality, or worse, in myself;
both these dirty me to myself.
This looks like being hard work
for the insulted mind
insulted, like some robot, by itself.

Diana, Robert, I am deeply, deeply regretful.