The Poems Have Abanoned Us Poem by Daniel Brick

First Voice:

The poems are absent, they
have been absent for a week, a full week.
Oh, yes, some have arrived tardy, an hour tardy,
two hours tardy, a half-day even. It does not
matter, because the ones that do show up are not
the ones we want, the ones we need
to strengthen our fiber, to make our senses
keen and our minds fresh, and simply
to make the whole thing work. We've all known
for weeks that it's not working: the poems
we recite don't restore us, the poems we love
no longer reside inside us, we're empty, people!
We've been afraid to say this out loud, because
what remains silent, buried in heart-depth,
in mind-caverns, in voice-fissures,
what lies buried may be just one person's
fancy, one person's terror -
But I'm saying it out loud, and all of you
know what this means. S-A-Y I-T. Someone else,
anyone say it... The loss must be carried...
by all of us. Someone else! Say it!

Second Voice:

We all know he's given to
hyperbole. The way he praised
even novice poems. He could never
tell anyone the truth. Yes, yes,
poetry means so much to him, he wants
everybody to enjoy it, to profit from it,
to do it. That's all very fine, very noble,
very stupid. THIS is where it has gotten us!
But, my friends, the crisis is not terminal.
There are shreds of poems all around us,
discards, rough drafts, debris. We pick up
the detritus, no longer despised. Pieces
lying on the floors of workshops, pieces
littering the Great Hall, love poems left
on garden benches, sacred poems in church pews -
you can find them everywhere you turn. We will
assemble the fragments, work in teams and
build new anthologies. Stop listening to his kind.
HE WOULD HAVE YOU DESPAIR! Cast him out,
denounce him. Bundle up the fragments, form
committees of recovery, replace what has abandoned us:
It will be just as good, if not better.

Third Voice:

The poems have been whipped
into shape. The ones that returned
hid in the libraries on campus. We assume
they got help from followers of that disgraced
one. Several hundred of the fugitive poems
were huddled in the TRAVEL SECTION: the lowest
shelves, where books about places no one goes
were housed. You know, places like Death Valley,
Valley of the Kings, Central Amazonia, the steppes
across the Taiga, that sort of thing. In one day
we dragged them all out. We sent some to be pulped.
The others we whipped into shape. All in one afternoon.
Why not pulp them all, I say. The Iliad, Gilgamesh,
Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Ezra Pound's Cantos,
All of Rilke, all of Shakespeare, all of - whatever.
Those poems always made me uncomfortable, like I
should be someone else... Pulp 'em all!