Maine should be pleased that its animal is not a waverer, and rather than fight, lets the primed quill fall. Shallow oppressor, intruder, insister, y… - Marianne Moore

I don't consider In Distrust of Merits a poem. It's just a burst of feelings. It's emotion recorded, a 'haphazard form ' a protest.

... The world's an orphan's home. Shall
we never have peace without sorrow?
without pleas of the dying for
help that won't come? O
quiet form upon the dust, I cannot
look and yet I must. If these great patient
dyings - all these agonies
and wound bearings and bloodshed-
can teach us how to live, these
dyings were not wasted.

TO A GIRAFFE
If it is unpermissible, in fact fatal
to be personal and undesirable
to be literal — detrimental as well
if the eye is not innocent-does it mean that
one can live only on top leaves that are small
reachable only by a beast that is tall? — of which the giraffe is the best example — the unconversational animal.
When plagued by the psychological,
a creature can be unbearable
that could have been irresistible;
or to be exact, exceptional
since less conversational
than some emotionally-tied-in-knots animal.
After all
consolations of the metaphysical
can be profound. In Homer, existence
is flawed; transcendence, conditional;
“the journey from sin to redemption, perpetual.