Stiff
If you can keep revising when all around you
are bringing polystyrene cups into
those windowless rooms with the long tables;
if you can keep on journaling while all
around you mask feelings and ideas
in words that don’t say what they think they say;
if you can ‘kill your babies,’ and also
adopted children, siblings, spouses, friends,
then send out miscalculated packets
of what’s left to journals called Femaelstrom,
Foetid (English), Quisling (Norwegian)), Gland;
if you can welcome onslaughts of SASE’s
with curses, yet Christ-like humility;
then you’ll be a poet, my friend.
Go to Source
Author: The Best American Poetry
