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Not all who write are marching still,

but some are hauled across the land

no summons, no divine decree,

just gravel clinging to the hand.

Some set off clear-eyed, blades aligned,

intent to split the sky with word.

They chased a theme, a structured cause,

and bent the world to what they heard.

But most are dragged by unseen weight,

by murmurs flint can’t spark their fate.

They stumble first, then walk, then chart

a route with no defining art .

The older ones wore armor loud

Dante with a scaffolded wrath,

Milton with iron in his verse,

their goals fused tight with time and path.

But others roam in different light,

no city burning in their view

they listen where no banner flies,

and mark what rain and tension do.

The lyric kind is ruled by turns,

they track a pulse beneath the field.

They do not ride on calls to arms,

but dig to where the wire yields.

No thesis waits behind their pace,

no endpoint drawn with steady ink.

They only name the thing they've seen

once forced to stop and forced to think.

Obsession isn't optional

it coils inside the second line.

It shapes the work before it speaks,

a motive masked in clear design.

And yet, some merge the lyric drift

with something deeper, thread by thread

the search for God within the grind,

a question aimed but never said.

He asked: If not to near the truth,

then why begin the path at all?

A voice that wasn't meant to soothe,

but punch the breath out, make you stall.

And those who track his marks in stone

will never find the full design

just flares of thought, like coal once lit,

still giving heat beyond their time.

Each work a module, self-contained,

yet tuned to one persistent chord

not in the scope of epic song,

but in the weight the line endured.

This too becomes a kind of march

not in formation, but in fire.

A poem is forged, not built or sung.

The trail is cut, then climbs higher.

The critic trails with steel in hand,

to measure what was done or meant

but finds the arc was shaped by need,

and not by rule or argument.

So let them come, the ones obsessed

who live within the phrase they frame.

Their pilgrim path is made of heat,

of pressure, scope, and unnamed aim.