Though laboring long in dark obscurity

With naught but love, a candle and a pen,

Proud ink still flowing with such surety

As words recall your elegance again.

If I could capture beauty on a page

Or hold pure rapture in a single line,

Exacting so a poet’s highest wage

As he pours out his heart in aching rhyme;

Perhaps of peerless beauty I might tell

Where humble verse might glow in borrowed light

Revealing so an essence that could  quell

The harshest critics and their stygian spite—

All words fall short where there is no compare.

What lyric lauds an angel half so fair?