Cummings & the whale

Poems are hard
as atom bombs
e e cummings said
one day at the beach
wavelets laurels in your hair
when Lowell (et al)
decried his couth 
unstrictured voice
your words are gulls and there
a whale, beached 
promethean, slowly dying
watching its own death
with that naive, ancient eye
a heart so slow
it measures time
in intangibles like love songs
still, while you tear
at the monster’s side
tears like quills
hoping for the ambergris
of too studied convention
I will bend
my shoulder to a poem
in the returning tide
watch it
with an evening’s shadow grace