Cheese is the medium

Poets have been silent about cheese

Because whilst every subject is the message.

Cheese is the very medium of their work.

We drink in language with our mothers milk

But poets curdle words until they bite,

With substance and a flavour of their own:

So Donne is sharp and Geoffrey Hill is sour

Larkin ascerbic, Tennyson has power

(But only late at night, taken with port)

I like them all and sample every sort

from Creamy keats with his mossed cottage trees

tasting the words themselves lke cottage cheese

To Eliot, difficult, in cold collations

Crumbling and stuffed with other folk’s quotations..