Alliteration Contest Poems: Courage, Jeffrey Rensch

Jeffrey Rensch has been writing poetry for 50 years.  Previous poems of his on Poems for Persons of Interest include "Being," "Carol of disarray," and "Thank you for the shivering," which won the Thanksgiving Poetry Contest last year.

Courage

Courage, come when you can.
Courage be mine, don’t make me
Show you in order to have you.
Courage, show at night from nowhere,
The last alternative to terror,
The only viable thing besides.

When there was peace we put
Our courage in a drawer and closed it
Tight and the key got tossed
And the side fused with the desk itself
And soon our fingers slipped
When we tried to tease it open.
We grew afraid of the drawer.

In a far metropolis I was mugged.
They ran down an alley.  Somehow I
Went after my life without a thought
And grabbed it.  I was like a thief
Myself.  How had I managed it?
There was no drawer, only the thought
Of losing felt like a death.

Courage was nowhere till it was.
Only when something else was worse
Was it there at all.
There was a power to push things back
Only when things themselves
Must be saved or yourself was lost.
Fear was the underside.
Things had no existence otherwise.
Courage came to tender animals
Only for other things
More tender still – they must be saved.

I closed it in another drawer
As soon as such was possible,
Wanting it neither to be nor to be
Needed – since when it is needed
It will exist again out of nothing
But not till then and never again till then.