We all have a favourite bad poem, something so cringe-inducing, excruciatingly bad you get a thrill off like a 10-year-old might get off a gory movie. A poem you revisit every six months or so, to find with delight that it's even worse than you recalled.

Well, at least I do. It's called "The Night Abraham Called to the Stars", by Pulitzer-prize-winner Robert Bly, and it is supposed to be a Ghazal, though not a very strict one - actually, it bears no resemblance to the Ghazal form whatsoever, which consists of rhyming couplets and refrains, but I guess Bly needed the ethnic bonus points. Bly entertains us with corny, obvious imagery which he then proceeds to cornily explain, and then finishes the poem with the most absurdly awkward imagery I have ever seen. All the while making very gratuitous use of enjambment, in actual rhythm stead - repeatedly.

Let's look at it closely.

Do you remember the night Abraham first saw
The stars? He cried to Saturn: "You are my Lord!"
How happy he was! When he saw the Dawn Star,

He cried, "You are my Lord!" How destroyed he was
When he watched them set. Friends, he is like us:
We take as our Lord the stars that go down.

When Abraham first saw the stars, he cried to Saturn: "You are my Lord!" Prior to this Abraham had lived inside a cave in Northern Chaldea and had no acquaintance with stars whatsoever. This is further illustrated by his confusion when, amazed with the stars, he cries out to Saturn and then to Venus (the morning star) which, though kinda visible to the naked eye, aren't exactly stars but something else altogether (planets).

But of course Bly is not just throwing the planets on us at random. Saturn, as we know, symbolizes severity (it is the root of the adjective "saturnine") and patriarchy, and Abraham is a patriarch - whose progeny, as it appears in the book of Genesis, will be as numerous as the stars in heaven. Then the stars set, progeny and patriarch, and we see the morning star, which in Latin is Lucifer - expelled from the firmament, always closely following the sun (Venus is never more than, I don't remember, 40 degrees? 35 degrees? away from the sun in the sky), the light-bringer. Besides being Lucifer, the morning star is also Venus, a planet that symbolizes love and all that comes along with it (it is the root of the adjective "venereal"). So Abraham, the biblical patriarch, first cries out to severe wise Saturn, surrounded by its numerous progeny, but then they leave him and becomes a worshipper of the morning star (Lucifer-Venus) instead. Thought provoking, but then that leaves him as well. Bummer.

"Friends, he is like us: / We take as our Lord the stars that go down." In case anybody missed it, we are not really talking about the life of the Biblical Abraham here. This is metaphor. Also, recall that Abraham is the man of the perfect faith, willing to sacrifice his own son if his zany god asks him to.

Notice the enjambent, how it shakes around what would ordinarily be a pretty ordinary verse: "Do you remember the night Abraham first saw / The stars?" Damn good device.

We are faithful companions to the unfaithful stars.
We are diggers, like badgers; we love to feel
The dirt flying out from behind our back claws.

And no one can convince us that mud is not
Beautiful. It is our badger soul that thinks so.
We are ready to spend the rest of our life

Bly reiterates: "We are faithful companions to the unfaithful stars." Please note it down. It will be on the test.

In the first two stanzas, Bly used the stars as an allegory to the cold, unreachable ideals man is drawn to. In the next two stanzas, Bly surprises us by contrasting this image of ideal-sky with the image of mud, representing the seduction of materiality. The transition is stunning - it comes in the middle of stanza 3, out of the blue, with no warnings that we are changing subjects completely.

According to Bly, we love the stars, but we love the ground, too. You know who also loves the ground? Badgers. They love the ground so much they dig holes to live inside it. And so does man. We have the soul of a badger. We turn our backs to the stars and live in deep dark holes in Northern Chaldea.

Notice again the clever enjambment and how it turns an otherwise straightforward verse into one of sophisticated rhythm: "And no one can convince us that mud is not / Beautiful." Bly almost makes it look easy.

Walking with muddy shoes in the wet fields.
We resemble exiles in the kingdom of the serpent.
We stand in the onion fields looking up at the night.

We are going esoteric here, with much puzzling symbolism. Is "the kingdom of the serpent" Egypt, where part of Abraham's numerous progeny will end up as exiles? Until the first verse, we were badgers loving the ground and were quite ready to spend the rest of our life about it. Verse number 2 lets us know that no, really, we aren't, we are like Hebrews exiled in Egypt yearning for the Promised Land. Again, no transition. Stunning.

We stand in the onion fields - beautiful imagery, onion fields - looking up at the stars again.

My heart is a calm potato by day, and a weeping
Abandoned woman by night. Friend, tell me what to do,
Since I am a man in love with the setting stars.

"My heart is a calm potato by day." The heart of Robert Bly is like a potato - one of the calm ones -, comfortably half-buried in the ground, peaceful and serene like only a potato, when it is calm, can be. But that is during the day. Then night comes with its stars, and this unsettles the calm potato. It is no longer a calm potato, it is quite upset. It turns into a woman, a weeping woman abandoned by the stars. Stars that she (= the heart of Robert Bly) is in love with. Also: in stanza number 2, Bly addressed us as "friends" - he is speaking to the crowds, the lecturer to its audience. Now he has gone more intimate and talks to us individually, confessing: friend. Or maybe everybody else has already gone away.

Bly is Poet Laureate of the state of Minnesota, and, in 1968, received the National Book Award.