photoart: ralph murre
Austerity
by
Ed Werstein
The text of this poem has
been appropriated as a payment of debts owed.
What
if, like other states, the state of poetry were in default?
Poets
everywhere would be in debt.
A
word lifted here, a phrase there,
a
borrowed reference
and
pretty soon it would start to add up.
The
lenders,
wildly
rich with words
piled
high in library vaults
(words
like money, gold, jewelry,
estates,
off-shore bank accounts,
portfolios
and Porsches),
would
lend to us
at
ever-increasing interest rates.
We
would continue to write,
but
eventually our words would
disappear
as we wrote them,
repossessed.
We
would be left with only titles,
signifying
not our ownership
but
our mounting debts,
and
these few words:
austerity,
crisis,
foreclosure,
unemployment,
hunger,
poverty, war.
Words
that would never be taken from us.
~
first published in New Verse News
