Sunday, May 12, 2024

As Every Schoolboy Knows

 

        Everyone knows that Plato

        in the tenth book of his

        Republic, proposed to banish

        poets from his ideal State

            —Sven Birkerts



It goes to show

what everyone knows.

Well below

The practical city

of laundered prose,

the tired and tatty

poets conspire

in solitude.

They set afire

pipe and cable,

They send up lewd

reworkings of fable

through manhole covers.

They mail out letters

petitioning lovers

to abandon their betters.

Everyone knows

they had to move on.

We heard in prose

the poets are gone.

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