I am sorry, Mr Wilder.

My Junior English students are reading Our Town, by Thorton Wilder. For those of you unfamiliar with the play, it shines the spotlight on a small town in New Hampshire. No scenery, props, or intriguing plot line. This translates to bored students, constantly informing me that they hate it. This made me think of past writers and how they feel about their classic pieces of literature being put into the hands of immature, and, quite frankly, retarded teenagers. (Also, there is a scene in the play when one of the deceased characters goes back to earth to revisit a memory, but her experience was less than ideal. I thought that allusion fit nicely into this poem)


They sit around a pearly table-- poets and authors,
passing two cards to the left.
The playwrights too tormented and cheap to play this round.
Instead, they glance down at their earth
while Faulkner steals what is left of Dickinson's red chips.

One such playwright peers into the world's classroom
where his play is explored,
because a dead writer can do that.
seeping through the walls and into the desk
next to the girl becoming a woman.

He sees his work and glory--mass copied and laminated.
One such treasure strewn on the carpet,
bent to a page far before the climax.

He looms over her shoulder to see why she loves his art;
what he spent years perfecting.
She has etched "This book sucks" at the top of the second act.
She is an author now.
Ink bleeding through his pages of published progress.

He can do nothing except grieve and curse the swine
chewing his masterpiece only to spit it out.
The ghost of its genius, using his celestial hands,
trying,
failing
to haphazardly pluck every copy from every desk,
preserving their unappreciated authenticity.

The earth is not what he remembered.