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 A JACK LONDON ODE And Writer’s Plea |
This clicheed modern
world dismays us.
We look to you, Jack London, to amaze us
And from rampant mediocrity to save us.
Write with your dendritic fireworks
Your novels leaping off the page
In bursts of flame,
And let us live your life vicariously
With passion if not fame,
Whether drifting on Alaskan icefloes
Or dispatching from the darkest dens of Asian wars,
Or out to sea with schooner knifing
Through the tropics’ foreign waters.
I’ve walked your favorite Sonoma paths
Exploring your beloved sunny cottage,
Studio and sleeping porch,
Where once you farmed by day
And wrote by night
And drank till dawn
To hand down verbal lightning strokes
Enkindling readers from most distant nations
Who clamored for translations,
All drawn closer through every book and essay,
Though some continents away.
Jack, immortal mentor, shower us with imagery
And guide our texts with vestiges of yours
To link our perspiration
To the roiling waters ’round your beacon prose
Of inspiration,
Creating till the cows come home,
Until the final vintage barrels in with cork and heady foam.
---Sonoma,
Ca.
©2008 by Paul Hertelendy. The photo of Jack London is courtesy of The Bancroft Library. This poem first posted Jan. 21, 2008.
Paul Hertelendy is critic and webmaster for the arts-review web site www.artssf.com, and is also the Piedmont (CA) Centennial poet laureate. To visit his website, click here: PAUL
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