FALL/ WINTER 2011

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Ed Stevers

APOLLO AND CASSANDRA

Here is the poet at sixty,
who sits at her morning table,
waiting for a poem
to flutter down from Apollo:
Cassandra, who for years
could predict exactly which poem
could conjure proper praise.

But now she is barren,
as if Apollo had spit
into her mouth
and obliterated her gift
of prescience, leaving only…

One would have thought
seventy-five or seventy
at the very least, but no,
now,
her pen poised
in the halls of eternity,
a marbled statue
in a museum gallery
waiting
waiting…
the only prediction unforeseen —
when the words
would suffocate.


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