by Penelope Scambly Schott
yet another one of the poets I have known
now gone under the grass. Lawrence Ferlingetti,
at a hundred and one. I once heard him recite:
Pity the nation whose people are sheep
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
and yet, how we all try
to go on walking.
Who will sell shoelaces down by the seashore?
Mine are torn.
Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her newest book is On Dufur Hill, poems about the cycle of the year in a small wheat-growing town.
