A Letter to Robert Bly

If plants wrote poetry, you know, they'd write prose poems....Plants are just not interested in a Miltonic style.
-- Robert Bly, in the April 1980 Poetry Project Newsletter

Dear Mr. Bly,
    I would like to deny
Your theory that plants prefer prose.
In my experience as a rose
I've noticed that the best poems spring
From a light loam of meter and rhyme.
Not Miltonic necessarily
(Though some lilies are very Miltonic),
But alive to the lilt and the swing
Of ordinary words.
We live, after all, among birds.
If this makes us seem, as you say, "right wing,"
My reply, Mr. Bly, must be, Alas --
A rose will never be a blade of grass.
Grass has its uses, I daresay.
There are days in May
When the lawn quite glows
With its democratic sense of duty.
But has anyone ever called such prose
An American Beauty?
    Sincerely,
    A rose

    -- Tom Disch