Eternal Wisdom of Young Writers (poem)

Eternal Wisdom Of Young Writers

Some things can be depended on
Some things never change
Flies still swarm around
The ripe carcass of a horse

English departments
Still deride
Robert Frost
Entirely ignoring now
Sandburg;
Edgar A Guest
(Carl and Eddie
Didn’t make the cut)
Not even
Remembered well enough
To enjoy the scorn
Of these
(How demeaning!)
Those two
Dead ‘poets
Of the people’

Pointee headed
Working-on-my-novelists
And unpublished poets.
Repudiate the works
Of their unpublished peers
By calling it ‘Frostian’
Do they?
They do.

How it tingles
How it rings
Familiar
After all these years

Old Robert
Old king Robert
Old published poet
Laureate Robert
The Frostiest
Of the
Frostians
Would have smiled

And written a poem

Jack Purcell
Poems of the New Old West ©2003