Steve Goldberg
WALT’S BEARD

When I was ten or eleven,
sitting with an ice cream at a picnic table
next to a cabin that was Walt Whitman’s recreated birthplace,
I wondered if his beard was born there too,
such a tiny place and such an enormous beard.

I was a big fan of Abraham Lincoln
since I played him in my first grade play.
We sang George M. Cohan songs.
The teacher read “O Captain, My Captain.”
If Whitman liked Abe as much as that,
he was alright with me.

I licked my ice cream cone quickly
to prevent drips on the leaves of grass.
I wondered if Walt liked ice cream too.
He must have if he liked Lincoln,
but how did he eat it with that
magnificent beard?


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Steve Goldberg resides in Cleveland where he engineers and writes. His first chapbook, Tremont Crawl, is about the adopted neighborhood where he had organized a popular reading series. Steve has been described as a Dilbert dungeon denizen and a bodhisattva wannabe launched into a new experiment of neo-beat bohemianism