Who says poetry can express?

Who says poetry can express pain or discontent
or ever come near to describing
the melancholic grandeur of parting?

Who can dare say that poetry can express
the space that a death leaves?

All elegies are written in vain
and all poetry is vanity.
Even the greatest poets have only left behind
the scraping echoes of their words only,
words that hang occasionally resplendent,
only occasionally though, though mostly in shade.

Words barely touch the skin, the lived-in skin
of our lives,
futile, mostly clumsy, often vague,
they give the illusion of having approached the point
of expression.

Voice betrays words and words betray the essence
of the moment, of living, of dying, of whatever makes us
dull, sensitive, selfish and human.

However, the moment of poetry is also the moment of existence,
to rise against the immense unknowing of silence,
the insensitivity of poetry itself
and the artless finality of separations.