Neither Caesar, nor the Pope, nor the King,
nor Congress (and its librarian), has title
To one of Whitman’s trampled blades,
To a leaf of Dickinson’s silent sheaf,
To a pile of Frost’s war-worn grass,
To one hectare of Stevens’s measured lawn,
To a slip of Williams’s Queen Anne’s lace…
In the new world, free poets make it new.
Here and now, our tongue’s dead, in their old world tombs,
have our fond remembrance, not our obeisance.
Dave Read