I have always enjoyed Edgar Lee Masters, the midwestern poet of small town America, who wrote elegies for fictional characters in the graveyard of a fictional town, Spoon River.  These are some of my favorites...WW

from

The New Spoon River     by Edgar Lee Masters

Horace Knight ...

Friends!  Shall your white-houses and executive mansions,
Your halls of the States and the Republic
Be occupied by the thin-lipped and the bald-headed?
By the graduates of business colleges;
The readers of subscription books;
The fanatics on economies;
The hunters of vice and crime;
The wearers of hand-me-down Prince Alberts,
And satin stuffed ties;
The interpreters of democracy as mediocrity?
Or shall the lovers, the livers,
The well sexed, the philosophers, the artists,
The viewers of life as Freedom and Beauty
Occupy your white-houses and executive mansions,
And have something to say about the Republic
Founded by Tom Paine and Ben Franklin,
And Thomas Jefferson,
And the other bully begetters of children,
And of ideas, who knew the difference between a Rembrandt
And a chromo,
Between grape juice and Madeira;
And who knew that friendship and hospitality and happiness
Are worth all the principles and preachments in the world.


Nevill Hone ...

I shall be more than two thousand years forgotten
When the world will look upon
This Bible created and Bible dominated era
Of two thousand years
As the most monstrous period of time
Tangled, wounded, tortured, imprisoned
By a thousand falsehoods and slaveries.
I who was most gifted for happiness
Was unhappy, because of these things,
Knowing all the while
That happiness is the only good,
Happiness is the only end.


Kay Rutledge ...

I loved hospitality and the friendly glass,
And you counted it to sin, Spoon River.
I loved a horse and a race
In the bright June days,
And you called it gambling, Spoon River.
I was the intercessor of the harlots,
And the saloon keepers and the ill-begotten
Who became thieves and murderers,
And you named me as a friend to vice and crime.
I spent and gave away my money,
While you became land owners and church members,
And looked down upon me, Spoon River.
I loved fiddlers, and dancers,
And the tellers of stories,
And you considered my life wasted.
I sank down into meagre means,
And helpless blindness, and loneliness --
(All the fiddlers, all my cronies gone.) --
And you saw me as the victim of unrighteousness,
And passed me by.
I died
But did I follow you, or lead you
Into the kingdom of heaven?



Robert Chapin ...

Have you stood in front of the iron bars,
And watched the lion look over your head?
He sees the palm-tree and the mate,
And the waste of the tawny desert!
Are you moved by music, or the concourse
Of melodious words?
But how are you moved except for life
That made a self of you, responding
To sounds or scenes of remembered places,
Or other spheres, perhaps?
Life is a cage!  Beauty is a vision
Of a freedom once enjoyed.