Did you have it in you? Was the rabble enthralled?
Were you yielded up to it when they called?
Did you skitter out along a perilous rail?
Was it slick enough to keep them off of your trail?
And when you were slow to invoke your muse,
did she dangle in your ear on a smoking fuse?
Did you strive, then, to tally what the figures told
and wrest it from their ethereal fold?
Did you summon up ciphers that the shadows hold
and revive the sleeping, innumerable runes?
Oh brother, father, keeper, man of rooms!
Your patronym grants us, for a worthier time,
flesh for the marrowy pith of yet one more rhyme,
which surely will blow in the wind your tale
through sand and bark golgothas – your skeletal wail.
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