“Shield the joyous” — A short piece that is definitely more than the sum of its parts.

And it reminds me (with goosebumps) of Tom Wayman’s wonderful poem “What Good Poems Are For.”

There is also (though this is more rare)
Bob Smith’s story about the man in the bar up north,
a man in his 50s, taking a poem from a new book Bob showed him
around from table to table, reading it aloud
to each group of drinkers because, he kept saying,
the poem was about work he did, what he knew about,
written by somebody like himself.
But where could he take it
except from table to table, past the Fuck offs
and the Hey, that’s pretty goods? Over the noise
of the jukebox and the bar’s TV,
past the silence of the lake,
a person is speaking
in a world full of people talking.
Out of all that is said, these particular words
put down roots in someone’s mind
so that he or she likes to have them here—
these words no one was paid to write
that live with us for a while
in a small container
on the ledge where the light enters