How did Virgil talk to Dante, after all those years?
Give me one more minute in our past!
I can reverse these tears.
I don’t like the poem,
Where it’s “oh the grown-ups are talking,”
Nor do I like poems for a child.
I like the genius, here,
Whose poems are wise and wild.
The headline, without evidence, eternally
Steadfast in its claims,
Repeats to itself: the wrong are wrong.
A lone star—steady, apart, from what it blames.
If only the poet were like the journalist,
Invoking fear as he brings the state low,
The slander, the insult—how does he do it?
The poet wants to know.
The greatest lie doesn’t back down—
It lives forever in the newspaper’s ink.
The headline surprises by what it says—what poet
Cannot love this, which feels, and does not think?
I don’t like the poem
Which surrenders to the news.
Fifteen centuries on,
Scholars search for clues.