For Enda Coyle-Greene
Xanadu, Inisfree, Elsinor
are gone for poets ever more.
Prufrock can leave and eat his peach.
Ice box plums can’t be re-stolen
in a common red wheelbarrow
then tipped on Dover Beach.
Paradise is as lost as the Inferno.
Brooklyn Bridge is sold, as is love
when blushed then applied to a rose.
The ball turret gunner will stay at peace.
He will not be demeaned in death
like that again. The State can rest.
For that dread shape with Shakespeare’s
head and poetry’s insatiable maw
is consuming last metaphors
as it slouches toward Coole.
It makes swans fly then honk at us below,
‘Whose woods these are I think I know.’
Poem
Copyright
Ross Donlon