The Poet Tree

THE POET TREE

I planted you in Shakespeare

Watered you with Rimbaud

I wrapped you up in Shelley  

And I let the Wordsworth grow

I raked your leaves of Whitman

When they fell like golden Poe

I watched you bend with winter Frost

As the cummings came on slow

In brightest Blake and darkest Burns

I knew your Hardy limbs would soar    

I propped you up with Coleridge

And Carroll and Keats and Moore

It was in the early Sandburg

When the Ginsberg wind did howl

That I held you down with Eliot

And anchored you with Pound  

I wasn’t sure the Plath you’d take  

Or if your Kipling could hold on

I knew your leaves were Browning

And your Dickinson was gone

And so when Auden led to Nash  

And Robinson to Lowell  

It was Brautigan that brought you back

When Hughes and Schwartz got slow

I planted you in Shakespeare

And watered you with Rimbaud

A little a touch of Byron

And you’ve become a Longfellow

-welker- 

1975