James Worley

The Cost
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Soft answers turn away, they say,
Wrath. True perhaps. But at what cost?
How often wrath, thus answered, veers
Smirkingly sure its point is made.
(Wrath smirking battens unassuaged
And preens to fright another day.)
Is a wrath turned smug to be preferred
To one confronted, challenged and-
If unquellable- endured
In the dignity that stanchness gives
To those whose cause willl not defer?
(Even wrath that overpowers
Is lessoned and diminished by
A victim that is adamant.)
Soft answers, sponges, take offense
Into every masochistic pore
And spongelike hold it hidden neat
In lieu of the gusts that courage gulps.
(While the tide that lordly forced the pores
Ebbs in contemptuous certainty,
Its flotsam stays to fret each cell
Of the seeming-same soft-answerer.)            



in "For Malcolm", p.5
in "Part I. The Life"