Tradition and the individual talent...

As a student of literature I leaned towards the modernists; T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore. It was in their poetry that I immersed myself. I have often walked through the subway station at Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. It is a maze of underground tunnels used by commuters to get to work. So this little writing below touchs on these two aspects;

The Modernists
(for Eliot, Pound & Moore)

Hair combed neat, still damp.
Clothes pressed– she with stockings,
he with cravat.
We are the routine ones;

moving through these steamy,
‘wet, blackish boughs’...
made to ease our arrivals
and departures.

"Like the crowd on London Bridge
heads bent towards their feet."
Movement a slow, silent
procession towards separate
destinations.

There is little laughter in such faces;
but the myriad of frowns palpable
from excessiveness. "I too, dislike it..."

Yet, we are no different
from classicist’s passed,
nor avant-gardist’s to come.
Perhaps, this is the collective denouement
the wise men foretold;
just more subtle.

Wasted ones in a hollow land.