Undeserving Heirs in the Great Cemetery

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

The heirs of poetry and other arts

Do not just wait among the tombstones’ graves

With lines carved hard in marble.  Men with hearts

Begin their honing living.  Each engraves

His epitaph, his epitaphs with hope

That they will be his witnesses like saints

Who hover near.  Some scrawl as if on dope,

The Pollocks and the Whitmans, leaving taints

Instead of lines like Dante’s, no, not scenes

Like Michaelangelo’s.  Most dribble words

Deserving lichens, bulldozers with spleens—

With arts and verses more like sputtered turds.

  The deaths of some such heirs come far too late.

    They loathe great art.  They spatter out their hate.

© Phillip Whidden