Liar                                                                                                               



The robin is a liar.
The sweet soft words that form his song
are false, are libellously wrong,
his feathered pants on fire.

The oak he sings from, too,
its leaves pumped up with chlorophyll
to have us think it’s summer still;
that’s utterly untrue.

The landscape is a fake,
a trompe-l’oeil of foreshortening.
There flatly isn’t such a thing.
You see your big mistake?

The earth’s blue spinning ball;
that skin’s a trick of light and air
that looks to be, but isn’t there.
It isn’t there at all.


Mark Totterdell

If you have any comments on this poem,  Mark Totterdell  would be pleased to hear from you.