| The poet leads a strenuous life as through the world
he goes, He has to keep his kids and wife in victuals and in clothes; He works throughout the livelong day to build a little rhyme And all his genius flies away before 'tis dinner time. The lonely watches of the night he spends awake in bed But cannot join his words aright because the muse has fled. When slow success his efforts crown and he has built a verse Then everybody in the town agrees it aint so worse. They ask: "However do you make your thoughts like rivers flow ? You have the gift of Billy Shake, who flourished long ago. Why don't you write your news in rhyme and fill the daily sheet With tales of love and mirth and crime, done up in stanzas neat? Why don't you write the ads that way and tell us where to go To buy our boots and beans and hay and tickets for the show ? Say wont you make some poetry about the Kameroons To read at missionary tea on Thursday afternoons ?" They seem to think a poet's mind is like a sorghum tank And all he has to do is grind out verses with a crank. |
Verdigris Valley Verse
Albert Stroud
(Coffeyville, Kansas: The Journal Press. 1917)
Page 123
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