Not to Know How to Live

 All modesty is false modesty
when it comes to poems,
or to the silence
in which poems begin
before they are words,
when they are still daisies
at the foot of a dead god
in an anonymous painting,
thirteenth century. Not to know how to live
is one thing, and nothing
to be ashamed of.
But not to know
how to sit in front of those daisies
with tears in my eyes:
what a waste that would be.

--Jim Moore