What the Poets Could Have Been

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What the Poets Could Have Been | Text of the Poem

If every time their minds drifted,
they’d thought instead of a grocery list—
milk, eggs, shoe polish, liniment—
if they could have smelled lemon
and thought of lemons, not their mother’s
hands, 5
if they’d been more attentive
to Mr. Twardus’s lectures on manliness
while sanding garden boxes in shop class
and more exacting of the apron hem
in Mrs. Niff’s home economics, 10
if they’d been, in some cases, just a little taller
and hadn’t fallen so deeply in love each time,
hopping the fence to swim naked with a lover
in the county park pool, their buoyant bodies...

[The entire page is 253 words long]

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