Some leave with their words kept safely in tightly bound books
with slick covers and pictures of black and white pensive faces
Books that might be bought, autographed and read or perhaps not.
And some poets die with their words only kept on yellow legal tablets stacked in metal file drawers
only as dreams written by fading pencil lead or blotted ink,
written but waiting to be found.
Some die and are remembered
Some die and are discovered
We seldom meet poets or seek them out,
Only after we hear their well-worded tributes
by well-meaning newspaper obituary writers
and read a few beautiful verses of their perhaps long forgotten work
that is vaguely familiar but remembered
do we say, “damn, he lived among us, did we notice”?
How fortunate we have been to have heard the voices of Frost, Sandburg, cummings, Kerouac, Angelou and Ashbery,
Poems and their poets, like music, are meant to be heard.
DSS
DistantShipSmoke 