US Verse, After Auden

"Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful."

Verse has small value in our Unisphere,
nor is it fit for windy revelation.
It cannot legislate less taxing fears;
it cannot make us, several, a nation.
Enumerator of our sins and dreams,
it pens its cryptic numbers, and it sings,
a little quaintly, of the ways of love.
(It seems of little use for lesser things.)

Beta in Jar
Artwork by Erin McGee Copyright 2006

Michael R. Burch is the editor of The HyperTexts, where he has published the work of three Pulitzer Prize nominees and recent winners of the T. S. Eliot, Richard Wilbur and Howard Nemerov awards. He has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and his work has appeared over 400 times in literary journals and sundry publications in the USA, England, Scotland, Canada, Australia, South Africa and India, including: Light Quarterly, The Lyric, Poet Lore, The Chariton Review, Piedmont Literary Review, The New Formalist, Writerís DigestñThe Yearís Best Writing 2003, The Neovictorian/Cochlea, and Iambs & Trochees.


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