Is it poetry? they ask

                        Is it really
poetry? Sometimes by the fireplace
(and there'd been a fire, no mistake)
Ellen asked, is it still alight?
We'd peer at the whitening flakes
and chunks paled round a black stump.
It helped if you switched off the lamp.
Outside would be clearer, grass
and scrub and fences and tree-tops
roaring and blazing miles-wide
and fire-fighters awed in witness.
On the widening scale, sun and stars
are the only proven poets.
But their language deserts them, the warmth
of this and the light of that.
So many that have been,
known by these we see – light-years back!
And alas, the contemporaries our children
will reproach us for not deducing.
Back to the impatient questioner,
the poet, this warmable hand,
painted shutters and doorbells of the skull
swelling or clacking in weather,
and our strange inhabitant puzzling
warm or cold? Is there anything out there?