LETTER TO MICHAEL HOROVITZ

It is time after thirty years

We had our Poetry Renaissance

Rise, Children of Albion, rise!

It is time after nightmares of sleep

When we walked the streets of inner cities

Our poems among the burnt-out houses

And cars, whispering compassion

To the addicts shaking and the homeless

Waking and those who have come apart

In the nowhere of today

Begging in stations

Sleeping in boxes.

It is time to find

Our lost, those children

I taught three decades ago

To paint on ceilings

With sticks of incense

Rainbows of silence

For John Cage

To write on walls

In luminous paint

Pink haiku

For Allen Ginsberg.

It is time to awaken and emblazon the sky

With symphonies of sorrow,

To draft the articles of war.

Poets of the Underground

The doors have opened

The ghost of Walt Whitman

Grey-bearded, in lonely anguish

Walks with us.