[i]for Modern Poetry Fa02[/i]
“Can you imagine
if T.S. Eliot were
to enter the room, right now.”
Beckoning the call,
almost unnoticed, insignificant
dusty silent wings fluttering
in the mid-afternoon,
the karmic incarnate
sailed into the classroom.
We were unmoved
to the unannounced visitor
to the discussion, somehow
always retrospective to certain
expatriate literary geniuses.
How for fifty years (maybe more)
the accomplished poetic deities
lorded over form and words,
commanding
make it new!
let no words not add!
Forgotten now are radio speeches,
recantations, fascist salutes–
men now only in what is left
on signed printed pages.
Cinematographers love
a hero, but the literary world
will always worship a villain.
And now in this place,
if the insect would metamorphose
into human form, who among
the struggling minds striving
to add to a generation would not rise
and proffer a hand
as if to a long gone friend.
Instead, we sit intense–
eyes glazing–bored–
asleep–dreaming of the ability
to say anything worthwhile…
The gray unidentifiable moth
slips through the chalk-scented air
(the rustic classroom befitting
of an appearance)
and does not land,
wary of being crushed
by a student wanting to destroy
history under an ignorant hand.
I wonder if some of us
are dreaming of being human
when we are really moths
set to disrupt the harmonic-
balance of the class.
