John Keats never read Dylan Thomas or Yeats.
Dante didn’t know Shakespeare. Neither did Jesus.
I think of those I will never know, from countries
whose languages sound to me like mathematics,
that prince, for instance, who wrote in Siamese
in the seventeenth century, who could well have been
the best of all of us for all I know.
I think about that poet born today
in Montreal whose verses will go with vessels
blown by the lights of stars to the curling edge.
I know he is there. Listen. This is the time.
Or she is. Lord. Lord. I feel like Herod.
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