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“Nevermore”

Our vehicles swarm in a steel hot day
Around the busy round-about
Where the highway meets Route 4.
It was there my eyes saw a raven
Arriving and defiantly posed
Folding his wings behind his back,
In the center of the berm and spongy grass
Encircled by a wall of stone.

His eyes followed our every move;
Black like the craggy graveyards
He must have come from
(Like that stupid poem we read in school
About some creepy bird and loony fool).

The zig-zag of cars avoided his gaze
Amid the thump of rock and roll
And the taste of diesel fuel,
Swerving around the traffic loop,
A bottleneck for we suburbanites
For lo the many years,
Parading daily, always weary,
Drained by work or lack of sleep
Awaking from the dreamless dream,
No different than our kinsmen of before...
(Only this, and nothing more.)

The bird stands his ground in dreadful sight.
Not once does he take to flight
Despite the blaring horns
From trucks howling like the wolves.
As we pass try to hide our fright-
He is both half bird and ghost
(Like that poem we once had to read
O what did it mean? What did it mean?)

How long he’ll stay we cannot know
Perched on his pulpit in the weeds.
None of us dare speak of it,
Or worship it, or seek to comprehend
Why we just don’t shoot it dead
As he croaks a word we can’t ignore
That fills us with forgotten lore
(From that poem we all deplore,
The one felt in our very core-
“Nevermore!”
“Nevermore!”)

Last few words: 
A parody with admiration to Poe, and "The Raven" which I love and hate at the same time. I wonder if it is still the read in Junior High Schools, it was surely one of the most read poems my youth. Many of us were introduced to poetry with it. Of course, nobody really understood it...neither did Poe. But it sounded creepy. Some of it stuck.
Editing stage: 

Comments

would be proud to have inspired this poem. One thing I'd change :First line try on instead of in. For some reason it just seems more accurate

Poe
Nice one though long for me
weak eyes

listen online to The Bells, and perhaps The Raven, for a taste of one of the most loved and influential American poets ever- Baudelaire loved him and made him famous in France, and in England he was worshiped as the king of the Gothic movement. Great vocabulary and sound, a giant in the the history of the art of poetry which lead us to where we are.
As I mentioned, for most school kids Poe is among the first poet we are introduced to. There is hardly any American educated in the last 50 years who sees a raven or the word raven who does not think "nevermore". If nothing else, Poe was a master of the pentameter, and decades ahead of "the twilight zone" To say you never read Poe is like a novelist saying he never read Tolstoy who wrote the two works considered the greatest novels ever written (Anna Karenina, War and Peace.)
No excuses! Try him out, hear his poems on any of the youtube sights!
With best intentions...

..

Eumolpus
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
ee cummings

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