POET LAUREATE

    The Former Poet Laureate, renowned for droll
    unsentimental, understated verse,
    his new book out, was on a national roll,
    a circuit guaranteed to fill his purse.

    Who would have thought that in America
    huge audiences might gather just to hear
    the musings of a poet’s da-de-da
    or, in his case, verse free of such old gear?

    But sitting in just such an audience
    and hearing him perform, I realized
    his voice and verse, attuned in sound and sense,
    were subtly and ingeniously devised

         to plant in auditors a fertile meme
         that afterwards in memory would gleam.

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