Petit the Poet

Listen to:

Petit the Poet (1:25)

from Spoon River Anthology
by Edgar Lee Masters

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

 Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
  Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel--
  Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens--
  But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof.
  Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
  Ballades by the score with the same old thought:
  The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished;
  And what is love but a rose that fades?
  Life all around me here in the village:
  Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth,
  Courage, constancy, heroism, failure--
  All in the loom, and oh what patterns!
  Woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers--
  Blind to all of it all my life long.
  Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
  Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics,
  While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines?