What Sought You Thus Afar?

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

Could twelve-streets Titusville, that little town

Grow groves of sonnets and of poetry?

Each larger, richer city wore a crown,

Those places offering serendipity

This Titusville did not.  These longed for lands

You travelled to pretended to be pulsed

With prizes vaster than small places’ strands.

You found that you were often quite revulsed

By elements within these storied sites.

Their stanzas and their cantos left you flat.

They failed to give your veins the volumed flights

That Florida withheld, their emeralds matte.

  Besides, your mother wasn’t there where dad

    Could not declaim the lines that made him glad.

~ Phillip Whidden