They do not call us Boomers,
born too late to wear that name,
and Generation X we’re not
having slipped into life a bit too soon
Each generation bides its time
Seeking its voice and words to say
But in the waiting we seem stuck
Adrift in some self-wrought malaise
The roll of my peers, so much caught up
in decades outside our recall —
the sixties, that we barely saw
the seventies, our childhood strife
the eighties, when we came of age,
barely surviving the complaisance of greed
the nineties, that we’d lief forget
And in the absence of great cause,
we manufacture strife and angst
to disenfranchise our own selves,
disown our own, and silent, sleep
While other generations’ seers
and sages, poets, pens now silent, lost
await rebirth among our ranks
I call them out and wonder why
they do not answer, are not found:
Faulkner, Cummings, Hesse, Frost
Williams, Roethke, Breton, Plath
Lewis, Huxley, Sanburg, Hughes
Cassady, Steinbeck, Fleming, White
Eliot, Cocteau, O’Connor, Maugham
must you all wait, in restless graves,
denied rebirth this time around?
01 MAY 2004
