Poem-A-Day: Tis Late by April Bernard

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Tis Late  by April Bernard   Of course the tall stringy woman draped in a crocheted string-shawl    selling single red carnations   coned in newsprint the ones   she got at the cemetery   and resells with a god bless you   for a dollar that same woman    who thirty years ago   was a graduate student   in playwriting who can and will   recite "At the round earth's   imagined corners, blow--"   announces silently amidst her louder   announcements that the experiment   some amateurs mixed of   white fizzing democracy   with smoky purple capitalism   has failed. We already knew that.   Her madness is my madness   and this is my flower in a cone   of waste paper I stole from   someone's more authentic grief   but I will not bless you   as I have no spirit of commerce   and no returning customers   and do not as so many must   actually beg for my bread. It is another   accident of the lab explosion   that while most died and others lost legs   some of us are only vaguely queasy   at least for now    and of course mad conveniently mad   necessarily mad because    "tis late to ask for pardon" and   we were so carefully schooled    in false hope schooled   like the parrot who crooks her tongue   like a dirty finger   repeating what her flat bright eyes deny.   Copyright © 2013 by April Bernard. Used with permission of the author. About this Poem:   "In a New England city where I once lived, there is a well-known local 'character,' a former graduate student, now street person, who recites poetry from the canon. I put a Donne sonnet in her mouth for this poem's purposes, because Donne is one of my touchstones and because, as I hope is obvious from the poem, she and I have so much in common. We are all of us only one or two steps away from the street."   April Bernard Poetry by Bernard Romanticism   Poem-A-Day launched in 2006 and features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.   Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem In Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org. February 28, 2013 April Bernard is the author of four collections of poems, most recently,  Romanticism (W.W. Norton, 2009). Last year she published a novel, Miss Fuller (Steerforth, 2012).  She is the Director of Creative Writing at Skidmore College and teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars low-residency MFA Program. Bernard won the Academy's 1989 Walt Whitman Award.     Related Poems At the round earth's imagined corners (Holy Sonnet 7) by John Donne The Soul unto itself (683) by Emily Dickinson Difficult Body by Mark Wunderlich

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