Pawn Promotion

On receiving your booklet for review

I hold in one hand
your staple-bound babies;
words still warm from the incubator
and question myself

about my judgement,
and how dangerously light your new-born feel.

For though the cover quotes peal,
like doting parents,
that they’re ‘brilliantly executed’
‘with ne’er a word wasted’
I am far from convinced by your careful craft;
it’s full of sane same-ness and dead formations.

For I’ve become a midwife, on the conveyor-belt shift
witnessing this mystery once too often.
I have taken to weighing, with the professional efficiency
In red-penned notes for rough review.

But I hope, you know, that I have missed your point.
That, at sometime, posterity will call me an Ass.
Better than Herod; killing the innocents.

I’d rather have miracles
than majesty of taste.

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