The Poem in Contemporary America

 

 

When the country gave up on justice

We imagined the poem

Had a soul, we

Spoke of poems

As being like refugees

Or prisoners.

When you strangle a poem

It chokes

Like a real man,

Thrashes about

In its hemispheric

Dying brain,

And the poets

Of my dead country

Salt that poem

With studied tears.

Think of all the elegies

We will write for the Republic!

Think of the poem

Carried through the streets

Weighed down with flowers,

The poem, burning

On its pyre

In the great public square.

Of course you should think what you will:

Perhaps poems are not human at all

Or they represent something worse?

Can I say the poem

Alone is a verdict—

A slave who recites at Ephesus,

The speech of a captive child,

And the morning star, the moon up…

 

S.K.