All poets languished in the Age of Prose.
There were no ears to hear their silent verse.
So few of them apostrophized the rose
or decked remorse in figurative clothes.
No Hippocrene to quench poetic thirst,
the poets dried up in this Age of Prose.
Just how it started, no one can suppose,
nor know how an affair can be reversed
in which there is no interest in the rose.
For all there was to read was news of woes,
in language neither beautiful nor terse.
The poets suffered in this Age of Prose.
Unfeeling gents would punch them in the nose
or “disappear” them in an unmarked hearse.
They lived, they died, and no one brought a rose.
The pallbearers were all the poets’ foes,
who mourned that there were no more left to curse!
The poets languished in this Age of Prose,
when folks could not care less about the rose.